A Message from the Worker-communist Party of Iran to the Workers and People of France

Accept our warm regards on behalf of the workers and people of Iran, who are yoked under the Islamic Republic’s suppression.
Without any doubt, the whole world is following your sensational struggle. Not only because whenever you, the heir of the great French Revolution, the Paris Commune and the May 68 Movement, move yourselves, all eyes turn towards you, but also because the issue that you are struggling for is an issue for millions of human beings all over the world. At hand is the prospect of an increasing number of years of direct enslavement of the worker. It is an increase in the years of exploitation, via an increase in the retirement age, for the benefit of capital, at the cost of decreasing those few years at the end of our lives during which we could perhaps take life a little bit easy. These are years that we have paid for many times over, and this right to retirement, “pension,” is something we have achieved as a result of our long years of struggle, but now that the world capitalist system is facing a comprehensive crisis, it has in the name of “savings” attacked even that little bit that we have accomplished.
If the average life expectancy of a human being has increased thanks to scientific advances and social progress – all due to workers’ efforts – capitalism is now demanding its own share. Workers must work extra years to produce added value so that the share that capital draws from social wealth becomes even greater; The “interest rate” higher, and crisis-affected capital starts moving. Cutting the social welfare, social insurance and legacy payments, paying legendary sums to the bankrupt banks and institutes from the pockets of workers and the people, is their usual method of choice in their other efforts for “economic recovery”.
The common essence of all of these measures is an increase in the years of direct enslavement of the working class, and a decrease in the working class’s share of the wealth, it has created. Thus, you have your finger on an issue that reveals the dominant relations over the human life. That is the reason why people, from students in high schools and universities, to employed workers, to the retired, are all standing on the same front lines to prevent the increase in retirement age. Humanity, tired of capitalism and its crises and discriminations and deprivations, is rising in Europe, and it finds the reflection of its wishes in your struggle.
Comrades: We too declare our solidarity with and support for you, and we ask you to continue on this path until the end. Workers and people of Iran, who in June 2009 brought forth a great revolution and are also struggling to free themselves of the yoke of the Islamic Republic of Capital, feel a common fate and deep solidarity with you. It is doubtless that any degree of decisiveness of your victory and progress will strengthen the struggle and the efforts of workers and people in Iran.
Do not allow them to rise the retirement age. Do not allow them to put the weight of economic crisis on the shoulders of workers, to deprive the masses and rob us of that modicum of tranquillity in our last years of life which is our right today. Do not allow them, in the name of “national economic salvation,” etc., to force you to compromise. Any recovery at the cost of a deeper and more comprehensive enslavement of workers will only be a temporary one, which will be followed by a broader crisis, forces our lives to a still deeper regression. This is something that time after time, throughout the history of capitalism has been repeated. Therefore, we hope that you insistently resist any offensive, and move for a decisive confrontation with this crisis and its resultant miseries to politically and economically disarm capitalism and take the governance of society in your hands. Do not allow the bourgeois opposition, on the shoulders of your protests and in your name, come to power only to continue the preservation of the status quo. You must cut this off at its root and finish this situation: instead of the logic of interest and the rule of the market, it is the logic of respect and welfare and freedom of humanity, i.e., socialism that should be established in society.
Worker-communist Party of Iran
October 23, 2010