Our fight, detailed in this manifesto, is a fight for a society in which cooperation would be logical and competition absurd, in which working would be interesting and useful, in which the arrival of a foreigner would be a good new.
The global ecosystem is today threatened by climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the poisoning of both soil and water, land development, and deforestation.... The environmental struggle has, in other words, become vital. This struggle will however only makes sense if it is both anticapitalist and antiproductionist.
We do not only oppose the abuses of the system that dominates the entire world today. We are radically opposed to its foundations.
Class struggle is the heart of our revolutionary struggle. It is both the bearer of partial transformations opposed to the logic and interests of the dominant, and of a revolutionary rupture laying the foundations of a new society.
We reject the myth of the republican, neutral, democratic state, overlooking particular interests. The State, on the contrary, is the organization of the political violence of the ruling classes which imposes itself on the basis of society.
The fight against racism is an essential issue for all those who fight for equality. It is of particular importance to enable solidarity between all exploited people against the State and employers.
The fight against patriarchy is a specific struggle which cannot be reduced to the fight against capitalism, although both feed each other.
The emancipation of each individual is not, for us, a secondary perspective. Far from opposing them, we affirm that the fight for individual freedom cannot advance without the support of collective struggles.
We generally favor social movements as instruments of change and action on reality. In terms of anti-fascism, they can have an essential role of containment and alternative.
We stand resolutely on the side of the people, against all imperialisms, be they global or regional. We fight for the abolition of the commercial plundering that ruins the Southern countries, and for the freedom of movement and settlement of workers.
Only direct struggles led from the base can impose actual social transformations against capitalists interests. We oppose a strategy of driving change through social struggles to the social-democratic strategy carried out through State institutions by political parties.
We promote the entire repertoire of actions of revolutionary unionism – strike, boycott, worker sabotage, blockade – including their new and reinvented forms, as long as they are based on the direct action of workers.
The advent of a libertarian society would not mean the end of history and the establishment of an “earthly paradise” ; relations of domination could persist or resurface. It will remain important to highlight values, to continue to question operations, practices, and probably to lead struggles.
Utopia can have a decisive impact on social movements. By stimulating collective imagination, it fuels immediate struggles, both in their forms and in their objectives, and it can give strength and credibility to our struggles by exploring the possibilities of an alternative society. Imagination is necessary to transform realities.
The revolution is due neither solely to ideological maturation, nor solely to “objective” economic conditions. It can occur at the end of a dynamic based on social practices which allow collective awareness and the emergence of an increasingly widely shared social project.
We do not conceive socialism as elabourated from outside the struggles of the proletariat. On the contrary, we affirm that it’s the workers themselves who have invented and reinvented the bases of an alternative society to capitalism through their struggles, especially in revolutionary times.
The outcome of state socialism, in its various forms, is negative overall. Historically, state socialism has been used as a weapon against the form of socialism developed by the workers themselves : crisis management by social democracy, construction of a « patriotic » capitalism by left-wing nationalism and of a bureaucratic state capitalism by Leninism, then Stalinism and Maoism.
Unlike predatory capitalism, incapable of stopping its destructive headlong rush for the planet, libertarian communism can achieve a balance between productive capacities, the needs of the population and the capacities of the biosphere.
UCL is a self-managed federation, placed under the collective responsibility of all of its activists. Without denying the necessity and importance of the organization’s coordination and leadership activities, we seek to establish a horizontal and decentralized framework for debate and intervention.
We are supporters of self-organization and direct democracy, resistant to the cult of unanimity and summary spontaneism. We know that these concerns may meet those of other “schools” of socialism.
