With the call of unions and left parties and organisation against the French government’s bill to raise the retirement age, the whole of France has since March 16, become a battlefield where workers and generally people are protesting and expressing their anger against the Macron’s administration.

The working class in France has been struggling against the governments’ attempts to further raise the retirement age for over a decade now. Thirteen years ago, it was Sarkozy’s government that increased the retirement age from 60 to 62 years; and now, Macron’s administration has decided to raise it further to 64 years in another attack on the working class, their lives and living conditions. In the past three months, there has been more than 8 days of national strike action against raising the retirement age, and the protests are escalating.

It is the extent the protests that has even forced divisions in the French parliament, with the government intent on pushing the bill through without a vote, while there are motions for impeachment of the administration!

In the recent years, the working class and the freedom-seeking people in France have been resisting attacks of Macron’s administration on their lives and living conditions, and the hard-fought achievements of the labour movement. This increase in the retirement age is part of the same broad attack of bourgeoisie and their governments that is taking place across Europe and the US, against the working class and the people of these continents. An attack that has so far brought about more poverty, higher inflation and cuts in the provision of the basic welfare, health and medical care, etc. This is an attack intended to abolish the gains that the working class, through years of struggle, had forced upon the bourgeoisie.

We, the working class of Iran alongside all workers and socialists around the world, stand in solidarity with the workers in France in this struggle. We consider the French workers’ struggle as an inseparable part of our own struggle and stand by them.

Today, more than ever before, our class needs to stand united everywhere, and raise the banner of “workers of the world, unite” in our struggle for basic rights, and for emancipation of ourselves and the whole humanity from the chains of this capitalist system of wage labour.

Long live workers in France

Long live workers’ international solidarity

 

Aso Fotuhi

Chair of Hekmatist Party (Official Line) – Organisation Abroad

18 March 2023