Spanish State – Revolutionary Committees: Call for a General Strike “Shut Everything Down”
Hereby we share an unofficial translation of a call published by the Revolutionary Committees on November 4.
November 11 – Shut It All Down!
Organize our anger, heighten our combativeness, eradicate pacifism
On November 11, we will once again take to the streets with the intention of bringing everything to a halt. Although housing is the central demand for the day of struggle on November 11, this general strike goes far beyond that.
The call for a strike was won by the working class itself. We flooded the streets of cities and towns after Maricarmen’s eviction. Impotence, rage, and the desire to rebel is what motivated hundreds of thousands of us to take to the streets to protest and demand a general strike. It was the pressure from the popular mobilization, particularly the encampments, that forced most unions to call for and/or join the strike. This strike goes far beyond housing, because we workers will not mobilize just for housing. We will mobilize for it all.
The supposed “welfare state” that the big bourgeoisie built, thanks to the superprofits reaped from the exploitation of the Third World, is falling apart. The housing crisis is just the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly difficult life in working-class neighborhoods, where constantly rising prices and a lack of opportunities are the order of the day. While life grows harder for the working class, the big bourgeoisie – organized into monopolies – is breaking profit records. They’re becoming millionaires at the expense of our exploitation. And then they call on us to vote and participate in their damned bourgeois democracy! We’re taking to the streets on November 11 to put a stop to it all. Against all of them.
The task of revolutionaries is to organize the anger and raise the fighting spirit of the masses against the big bourgeoisie and its imperialist State. All of this is aimed at building the revolutionary movement; that is, building a proletarian movement guided by the revolutionary ideology of the class (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), which is independent of social democracy, opportunism, and revisionism, and whose goal is to unleash the socialist revolution, with communism as its ultimate horizon.
Let us take as an example the struggle of the French people, whose rebellion in recent weeks offers important lessons to revolutionaries. The youth protests have spread like wildfire, both in imperialist countries such as Belgium and Italy, and in oppressed countries such as Albania. The lesson is clear: The proletarian youth wants to fight and is fighting! And what’s more, it does so without asking permission!
Opportunism and Pacifism
Opportunism is the infiltration of imperialism into the proletarian movement, because the origin of its social base (the labor aristocracy) lies in the exploitation of the peoples of the Third World (monopoly superprofits). What do the opportunists do? They move heaven and earth to deny reality and, with it, to deny the lessons from France. They say that people “don’t want violence,” that it “isn’t representative,” or that “the proletariat isn’t ready yet.” According to this reasoning, the proletariat should follow a “reasonable” path. Reasonable for the bourgeoisie, of course! For the November 11 strike, the opportunists are more concerned with having “peaceful picket lines” and “safe spaces” where there is no “risk of repression” than with shutting down production and organizing the rage that thousands are feeling right now. Ridiculous!
Events such as the clashes with police during the housing protests in Valencia and Barcelona, the expulsion of Vito Quiles from all the universities on his latest tour, the anti-fascist response to Vox rallies in Galicia, the resistance of students and teachers during the education strike in Madrid, and the metalworkers’ strike in Murcia are a bucket of cold water for the opportunists and their pacifism. The only “reasonable” path for the people is revolutionary violence. The narrative they’ve concocted to pull the wool over our eyes (so they can continue living their comfortable lives thanks to the distribution of monopoly superprofits) is collapsing under its own weight. They live far removed from the immense misery and poverty that plague our people.
Shut it all down!
This November 11, we’ll take to the streets, recalling the spirit of past strikes, such as the Canadiense [translator’s note: an important historical strike movement in 1919], but also of present ones, such as the miners’ march or the successive strikes in the Bay of Cádiz. Let’s go on strike at every workplace to halt production, to treat this day of struggle as a training ground for the future battles that history will present to us.
Let’s make the slogan “Shut it all down!” a reality. Let’s take to the streets on November 11 to halt production. Let’s stand up to the big bourgeoisie, its imperialist State, and its damned bourgeois democracy. This November 11 must set a precedent in the class struggle. It must serve to raise the fighting spirit and dispel the pacifist illusions within the proletarian movement.
This November 11 we shut it all down!
Let’s follow the example of the French people!
It is right to rebel!
