The struggle of the working class must be the fight to assert the interests of the class against the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation.

It is plain for all to see that the costs of the crisis of the capitalist system have been completely piled on the working class and the entire proletariat. Layoffs, job insecurity, unemployment, hunger, become the daily routine for more and more workers.

Fear of losing their jobs, fear of being on the margins of this system whose only concern is the functionality of every human being for capitalist profiteering.

And it is this same basic logic that drives the bourgeois offensive of the bosses against the conditions of the working class and the entire proletariat. The same reasons that led to the crisis in the capitalist system now require new and more intensive levels of exploitation of workers and proletarians: a Dante-esque spiral where the "least worst" seems to have no end.

Putting a limit to the damage is not enough: concrete experience has shown that any retreat from working class political positions and struggle means the foundation for further retreats and defeats at the hands of the bosses’ offensive.

The struggle of the working class, the proletariat, it is not a question of rights, but of power

This means that first of all to develop their own interests the workers' real struggle has to break the wall of bourgeois compatibility and that union-corporate-institutional system, which is the structure that stands as the guarantor of bourgeois interests and that, over time, has perfected all those mechanisms to isolate, divide and, where necessary, criminalise expressions of class conflict be they in the workplace or territorial. A mechanism that has dragged the proletariat from defeat to defeat and has intensified the levels of exploitation and its subordination to the needs of the bourgeoisie.

It must be said emphatically that on the other hand there is no bourgeois reformist solution to the crisis.

The daily reality is there to show this every day: the bourgeoisie itself – constrained by its own crisis - has decreed the death of reformism.

Reviving these reformist perspectives, as would the FIOM, is an illusion that does nothing but bring the working class into another dead end in search of a new, impossible, "compatibility" with this system.

For class autonomy

As internationalist communists we say that even for the defense of our immediate interests is necessary to break the vice that today grips the exploited class. This requires a political break with the corporate and institutional system that corrupts the air of our places of work, we have to organise to the level required to represent and give weight to those interests that are now suppressed and marginalised.

This means giving life to autonomous expressions of class struggle outside the trade unions and the so-called political left, outside and against bourgeois/boss compatibility as a first and necessary step. But the choice that imposes itself is a political choice: the struggles in the workplace must intertwine with the political struggle for the affirmation of a new society: Communism.

• It's time to fight

It's time to get organized

For class autonomy

For the internationalist party of the working class*

Flyer for the FIOM event on 18th May in Rome