To the International Working Class

From the Samara Strike Committee, 10 April 1999

The Samara Strike Committee—the host of the Second All-Russian Congress of Strike Committees—had to postpone the beginning of the congress from March 28 to April 17 due to the lack of money to transport the delegates of the congress to the city of Samara (the Volga river).

The coffers of our most militant working class organizations are empty. Our workers cannot fill them. They do not get paid their wages. Their families starve. Yet without some minimal financial resources the desperately needed higher level of class organization cannot be reached. This is why we, the organizers of the congress, have no choice but to appeal to the international working class, its organizations and all progressive people around the world to help us in making this event happen.

Why do we need this congress now?

We need it because all illusions that the anti-capitalist working class movement in our country can be organized from the outside, by the existing communist parties have been proven to be nothing but illusions.

We can now clearly see that the organized communist movement (”komdvizhenie”) formed and led by the remnants of the former CPSU has broken with Marxism, with the ideas and ideals of communism, has broken with the working class and has become either the agent of the nationalist bourgeoisie and the state-capitalist bureaucracy or has ossified into sectarian, self-centered formations—politically sterile and hopelessly removed from the actual struggles of Russian proletariat.

The accelerated disintegration and decay of the communist parties in our country has been accompanied by the profound weakening of the physical and moral strength of the working class under the terrible blows of the cannibalistic regime of capitalist restoration who now denies to us even the means of bare subsistence, of mere reproduction of our physical capacities to work, which even the slaveholders of the past did not deny to their slaves. We have been driven millennia back to the conditions of primitive want, of pure, unmitigated barbarism.

But the modern barbarism of the bourgeois society breeds fascism. The self-appointed “saviors” of workers and the nation are already marching in the streets of Moscow and other cities brandishing swastikas under the slogans “Russia for Russians!” and “Russians Are Supermen!” And they are not alone. They find sympathizers among the members of the monstrous apparatus of repression created by Yeltsin's regime to defend those who stole from us our factories, among broad sections of the petty bourgeoisie, among many intellectuals, and, yes, even among not a few workers, demoralized by the abysmal conditions of their existence.

We now stand alone against the barbarism of ‘liberal’ capitalism and the rising barbarism of its fascist twin. We now know that no savior will come to our help. We must save ourselves. We must save society. We must save the country. We can do this only by making it OUR society, OUR country, OUR dictatorship—the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

This is why we need this congress, the congress of strike committees who have already proven their will to fight in the battles of the rail war in the spring of 1998, in the occupation of enterprises, in establishing the de-facto power of the workers' soviets in a number of towns across Russia.

This is why we believe that we have the right and the duty to ask the international proletariat to help us now.

All Power To Strike Committees!

Workers of All Countries, Unite!

Donations can be sent

1) by wire to

Viktor Alekseevich Kotel’nikov 443074, Russia, Samara, ul. Morisa Toreza 71-77.

2) by money order or check to our international representatives

In Europe:
Robert Malecki
Ekenstamsvagen 7
915 32 Robertsfors
Sweden
Email: malecki@algonet.se

In USA ($US only):
Vladimir Bilenkin
P.O. Box 5192
Raleigh, NC, 27650-5192
USA
Email: rosskommuna@geocities.com

Grigory Isayev, Vice-Chairman of the All-Russian Strike Committee

Victor Kotel’nikov, Vice-Chairman of the Samara Strike Committee