The statutory General Assembly of Aplutsoc (Arguments Pour la Lutte Sociale) publishing the blog aplutsoc.org, was held on Sunday, January 22, 2023. After discussion and amendments, the reference text was adopted unanimously by the participants.

What is Aplutsoc
Reference text adopted at the General Meeting of January 22, 2023


Aplutsoc (Arguments Pour la Lutte Sociale) is a political center that publishes analysis, proposals for action, slogans, develops political perspectives, and debates them with the exploited and oppressed and the militant public.

In the history of the revolutionary proletarian movement, political centers, usually in the form of editorial committees, sometimes more informally, have played a decisive role. Thus, we can say that Marx and Engels were, from 1846 to their death, such a political center, as well as the newspaper Iskra which structured the revolutionary social democracy of Russia, or even that the French Committee of the Third International which gave birth to French communism before Stalinism. It is a useful, and worthy of interest, historical work to establish the key role generally played, in the birth of the main currents and organizations of our history, by this political form. But its lack of codification and the pressure exerted by the form, distinct and opposed, called « Leninist form of organization » and which it is more accurate to call the false party-fraction, have limited the awareness of this history.

The false party or party embryo, in the form of the fraction previously establishing a statutory discipline within it, and making the program – and generally a programmatic library supposed to represent its “continuity” – a charm, by which it is distinguished of the real movement of our class and opposes it, imposed itself as an obligatory form of most of the currents claiming to be revolutionary following Stalinism and then the Second World War. This pattern is expressed in a proliferation of various sect-fractions. They want to be, by their discipline, the embryo of the future party, and they are held in hand by the leaderships themselves organized into disciplined fractions, set up above and above their own organizations. This form plays a parasitic role which obstructs the construction of an International and of revolutionary parties, that is to say of an International and of democratic parties representing, in the plurality of their currents, the real movement of the majority of the human race, the proletariat [1].

A political center is both less and more than a faction-sect: it does not claim the discipline of the latter, but it tries to shape a collective consciousness through the content of the orientation it implements and submitted to discussion. It does not take itself and it does not intend to act as if it were the nucleus in a reduced model of a future homogeneous revolutionary party, but it tries to fertilize the real movement to move towards a democratic revolutionary party and, thereby, effective, to enable the proletariat to defeat capital and its states.

A political center must have a completely free and open debate, but it is more than a simple circle of discussion because it attaches itself, on the basis of an orientation for the immediate future, to impulse or to organize effective actions centered from a political perspective. We summarize this orientation and this perspective, and therefore our method, in the following four points.

First, the global climatic and biological crisis caused by capitalist production has already established a situation without possible turning back, which by itself leads to a destructive runaway for the majority of humankind and natural environments. The proletarian revolution, in the 21st century, is therefore a question of survival to which we are driven. The denial of the crisis of the biosphere by most of the organizations of the labor movement is among their failures with the most serious consequences. The greenhouse effect was understood and predicted in the 19th century, the Meadows report The limits to growth dates back to 1972, the IPCC has been around since 1988, and hundreds of millions of humans know they are suffering from the bio and geo-climatic crisis for several decades. The demands of survival set and will set in motion hundreds of millions of humans. Limiting future damage and rationally adapting to damage already done is incompatible with the pursuit of capital accumulation.

Young people are no longer fighting directly for a better world, but to save the human world (and therefore, to make it better if it is saved). We are not only in a time of wars and revolutions, we are in a time of geo-bioclimatic collapse and wars and revolutions depend on it. The ecological dimension is neither a supplement nor a higher domain, it is the bottom and rising base of today’s revolutionary stakes.

Secondly, it is not a question for effective revolutionaries of inventing the real movement of social struggles and human struggles for survival, which is there anyway, nor of giving it artificial forms, nor of educating it through an anti-capitalist content that he would supposedly not have, let alone tack on him, and ultimately against him, a vocabulary and an imagery that would be our own.

It must be helped to move forward on the basis of what it already contains, linking the demands, ecological, economic, democratic, feminist… (which, in fact, are always all four at the same time) invariably to one and the same conclusion: the seizure of power by the proletariat, i.e. the realization of democracy through the destruction of the state apparatuses (bureaucracy, army, police, « special organs » …) of capital and their main relays (Stock Exchange, media …), and their replacement by elected, democratic forms, at all levels: councils, municipalities … and at the national level: truly sovereign constituent assemblies, therefore not granted by a power already in place, nor overlooked by a state apparatus.

This method in France, where we find ourselves, leads to a systematic search for a political perspective leading to the overthrow of the executive power of capital, which is here the presidency of the Fifth Republic, of its regime and of its Bonapartist and prefectural state apparatus. This by the political centralization of social struggles, the key to their generalization, and by the unity, in this perspective, of the organizations resulting from their history. The question of power is neither a distant « anti-capitalist » horizon always postponed, nor a matter of electoral combination when the institutional calendar imposes it. It is present reality.

Thirdly, this political method that we have just summarized applies to all the states of the world, of course within the framework of their own specificities. There are no non-capitalist states, or states endowed with who knows what “anti-imperialist” virtue. The need to give shape to the already existing real movement by helping it to focus on the question of power and the realization of democracy through the destruction of the state apparatus of capital applies everywhere and calls for the elaboration by the discussion of an international revolutionary strategy.

This simple observation therefore excludes any “campism” [2] and encompasses the liberation struggles, particularly national ones, of all the oppressed. It is necessary for a concrete analysis of the present international reality, that of the « multipolar world » of clashes, divisions and re-divisions of the world between imperialist powers of which China and Russia are part, « multipolar world » which constitutes modern day barbarism opposed to today’s revolutionary movements that are sweeping the world. It is therefore necessary that the currents, movements, tendencies … which fight the real imperialist order, in particular by supporting the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people, come together through and in joint action and discussion of revolutionary strategy.

Fourthly, towards all the programmatic heritage of the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement (therefore of Marxism, of anarchism, of the Trotskyist, syndicalist, socialist-revolutionary currents…), we intend to avoid all fetishism as well as all levity: we take all this heritage seriously, we want to promote its reappropriation as an important means of consciousness, struggle and organization, but in relation to action in the present world, with the immediate concrete program whose three precedent points lay the foundation, without of course putting an end to its permanent elaboration and evolution. Theory is a guide for action provided that it draws its content from it.

Diverse individuals, formed by diverse political heritages, including philosophical, religious, cultural, national …, can and must join in common action and free discussion by bringing their contributions and their colors to the global movement to which we want to contribute.

From a simple informal editorial committee, Aplutsoc, due to the gradual increase in the number of participating comrades and above all due to the impact of its analyzes and the interest they can arouse, in a situation dominated by the international reclassification – splits and fusions – that must be imposed by the fight against the imperialist « multipolar world » affirmed since February 2022 and the defense of the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people, is therefore led by this text, to grow, be more effective and participate in this necessary reclassification, to clarify what it is as a political center.

Accordingly, Aplutsoc members recognize themselves in the four points listed above, they discuss among themselves their implementation, they discuss and defend the political perspectives bearing on the question of political power to which they lead, they act according to these perspectives and this method in the social movements, trade unions and political organizations where they are called upon to intervene, and they provide through a financial contribution to the needs of Aplutsoc, whose operating methods are specified in the statutes and the rules of procedure.

Notes

[1] Proletariat. Those who must sell, or attempt to sell, their labor power, in order to live.
[2] Campism. Political attitude of supporting an imperialist state or « camp » against others, notably China or Russia, by considering it « more progressive » or « less reactionary ». This attitude is opposed to the one considering that all the current states of the planet represent variants of capitalism. It blocks the struggle for the world proletarian revolution leading to the end of capitalism, and delays or prevents the latter.