The various episodes of massive social struggles and revolts that have crossed all continents in recent months respond to the class offensive of all the national bourgeoisies and their states. Economic crisis, economic and imperialist rivalries and the prospect of war can only lead to an exacerbation of class antagonisms under the impulse of the ruling classes. The period that has begun can be characterized as that of massive class confrontations whose outcome will largely determine the march to generalized imperialist war or the opening of a pre-revolutionary perspective. The information and study of these various class confrontations is one of the tasks assigned to communist groups in order to be able to define a general understanding of the course of historical events, always determined by the balance of power between the classes, by the class struggle, and to develop their capacity of intervention as political vanguards of the proletariat.

Limited by the space and the frequency of our journal we had to make a choice among these different workers and popular mobilizations - among those with proletarian characteristics. In addition to the information that the international bourgeois media could not pass over in silence, the reader can refer - we invite him/her to do so - to the revolutionary and more particularly communist press. The websites of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (http://www.leftcom.org), of the PCI-Le Prolétaire (http://www.pcint.org/), to mention only the most active communist groups [1], or the review A Free Retriever’s Digest (https://afreeretriever.wordpress.com/) and Nuevo Curso (https://nuevocurso.org/) have widely mentioned and taken position on different struggles on the American, Asian and European continents.

We have made the choice here to inform and take a stand on three proletarian struggles which seem to us, by their respective characteristics and dynamics, to show both the path to follow and the future of class struggle; and, through their limits, the main terrain of class confrontation, the one that the proletariat must assume and lead if it wants to be able to thwart the union and political traps that lead to defeat and clear its revolutionary path. The strikes of December-January in France – the mobilization is still going on at the time of writing even if the strikes have for the most part ceased - have clearly raised the question of political confrontation with the bourgeois state, with its police force, of course increasingly violent, but especially with its leftist union and political forces, in order to be able to extend the struggle, here the strike, to all proletarian sectors in France. The strike of the General Motors in the United States puts into perspective, even contradicts, the myth of a blue-collar American working class that can only vote for Trump. At the same time, it confirms that any remaining struggle in the corporation, here the automobile sector, imposed by the union apparatus as an organ of the capitalist state, is doomed to failure. Finally, largely ignored by the international media, the proletarian initiative in Finland - a country that is the world champion of happiness according to a bourgeois study - of a strike at the Post Office and its extension to all the main sectors of the country has succeeded in making the Finnish bourgeoisie retreat, momentarily of course. Contrary to the proletariat in France, which did not succeed, despite its combativeness and experience, to dispute the control and direction of the struggle to the trade unions, the proletariat in Finland took the initiative of the struggle and imposed its timing, weakening all the more the Finnish state and its trade union and political forces’ mastery and control of the confrontation.

We are only at the very beginning of historical class confrontations. But already experience teaches us that the proletariat will not be able to avoid engaging resolutely in the political struggle, in political confrontation, against the bourgeois state forces that are the unions and the left and leftist parties - as much bourgeois as the parties of the right. Claiming, fighting, disputing, controlling the political direction of each struggle, its terrain and its deadlines, against union sabotage is the path that the workers of General Motors have not been able to see, the one that the proletarians in France have glimpsed but have not been able to assume, the one that the proletariat in Finland has been able - probably in particularly favourable circumstances that are likely not to re-occur - to assume in part and thus provoke a retreat of the bourgeoisie.