[The following article appeared in the February 1 issue of the French Trotskyist weekly, Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The workers of France-Antilles, the colonial rag put out in the Antilles by the Hersant press trust, have been on strike for more than two months. They are demanding decent wages, the right of collective bargaining, and recognition of their union.
Since January 10 the construction workers have been in struggle against low wages and the high cost of living. They are demanding a 25 percent wage increase, which would bring the salary for an unskilled worker to 6.25 francs an hour [about US$1.25], that is, 1,087.50 francs a month [about US$217]. In an interunion general assembly they decided to go on strike indefinitely beginning January 10.
Since January 8 student youth in Martinique and Guadaloupe have been engaged in a powerful movement against increases in the price of room and board and partial board.
Since January 16 the agricultural workers at Vivé au Lorrain (in Martinique) have been on strike. They are demanding a daily wage of 35.60 francs, an increase of 6.05 francs a day•
At Fonds Brûlé and at Acier the agricultural workers are also mobilizing against the landowners.
At the Martinique International Paper Company, at Eux du Sud, in the hospitals, at SPEDEM, and at SPEDEG (in Martinique and Guada- 182
crats might cause a political vacuum into which underground leftist groups might step. "In our judgment," he said, "the people who are naturally discontented because they are living badly, because they are living through grave problems, are going to find a comrade, a neighbor, a militant member or activist of the Marxist groups who will give them his own version, and will propose actions against the junta."
in French Antilles loupe), everywhere the workers are in struggle.
In face of this mobilization, the regime is not pulling any punches. It is responding with the club and with class justice. The cops invaded the offices of France-Antilles and threw the workers out. Two workers were tried and sentenced. The mobile guard burst into the high schools and clubbed the young strikers. The police department decided to close all the schools.
The employers, strengthened by government support, have deliberately sabotaged the so-called negotiations. France-Antilles is being peddled by cops! It's unprecedented.
But the workers and youth are not taking it passively. The exemplary struggle of the France-Antilles workers has spread like an oil slick and has touched off a virtually general movement of workers mobilization. That general movement was concretized by a general strike on January 8 to support the France-Antilles workers. Powerful mobilizations united the student youth and the workers of Fortde-France. Also in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadaloupe), the youth are demonstrating against the increase in boarding rates.
This wave of struggle is living proof of the sharpening contradictions of the colonial system. But the various struggles are not yet unified; they are not converging toward a general confrontation with the French colonialist regime. The task of the Antilles revolutionary Marxists, of our comrades of the Groupe Révolution Socialiste
[Socialist Revolution Group], Antilles section of the Fourth International, is exactly to fight for the unification, extension, and politicization of these partial battles.
They are doing this by calling attention to the forms of struggle (democratically elected strike committees, committees, self-defense support against the colonial armed bands). And they are doing it by raising in the union meetings and the support committees demands against unemployment and the high cost of living that can be taken up by all the workers.
The most important of these demands are: sliding scale of wages under workers control; against low wages, equal increases for all; against unemployment and layoffs, reduction of the workweek with no cut in pay.
And they are also doing it through their Jeunesses d'Avantgard [Vanguard Youth] circles by calling on the high-schoolers in struggle to join in the battles of the workers. Dissemination of news and linking of the various struggles are assured by distribution of a weekly workers bulletin called "Le Travailleur Rouge" [The Red Worker].
In France in the heart of the colonial metropolis, our responsibilities toward our struggling Antilles brothers, oppressed for more than three centuries, are weighty. Certainly the wall of silence that surrounded the bloody repression of the riots of December 1959 and May 1967 in Guadaloupe and of May 1971 in Martinique is breaking down today. Nevertheless, chauvinism, fostered by the reformist parties, remains firmly anchored among the French workers. We must fight it on a daily basis.
The main unions in Martinique, supported by the political organizations, have raised the slogan of an"unlimited general strike" beginning February 11. On this island, where the clanging of the chains of slavery still rings out, where helicopters keeping watch are in the air constantly, where ten barracks of soldiers keep watch over three high schools, where the population is threatened by a contingent of legionnaires recently posted a few thousand kilometers away in Guyana, every development of popular struggle is immediately exposed to colonial repression.
Internationalist solidarity in France was never more decisive!