Contribution to the 15^th International Communist Seminar
"Present and past experiences in the international communist movement".

Brussels, 5- 7 May 2006

www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org

Theses on the present situation of the Austrian working class and the fundamental orientation towards it

Communist Initiative of Austria

1. In the industrial countries in recent years the total extent of the working class in its widest sense has grown. In many countries (in Austria too) in recent years even the – statistically demonstrable – proportion of workers in productive, surplus-value-creating sector, the trade and industrial proletariat, has grown. And this in a time of quite high unemployment figures and despite the exodus and migration of whole branches of production to developing and threshold countries. In Austria, as a result of the privatisation of sections of major nationalised industries there have been serious regroupings of large-scale to small and medium-sized companies. The extension of the service sector in particular has led to an enormous rise in the proportion of women in the working class.

2. Ever more strata (even highly and the highest qualified and academic) wage earners are being "proletarianised". Their situation in their jobs, the dependence on company management, social employment-law and financial standards as well as their living conditions are ever more clearly approaching the situation of the working class. This is also happening in the area of low- and medium-ranking civil servants, telecommunications, public transport, in the health and social services and in education.

3. All conditions of employment are subject to a serious transformation: even in regulated, standard conditions of employment, infringements of employment law are proliferating. The opportunities for wage workers to defend themselves against attacks on employment law are severely limited as a result of the pressure of work, the weakening of solidarity and the false trade-union policy of "social partnership". Added to this there is the further erosion of employment and social welfare law both by the social democratic as well as the bourgeois governments at national level, and all the more at EU level. Atypical working conditions such as pseudo-self-employment and fictitious contracts for work are increasing in all sectors.

4. A considerable chunk of previously standard contracts of employment are subject to precarisation; women are disproportionately affected by this. Full-time jobs are being reduced to part-time, capacity-linked variable working hours are proliferating, the number of short-term employment contracts is rising. Added to this is a range of measures in the field of social-security law aimed at forcing women out of working life.

5. As a result of actual or illusory independence, many qualified, above all young people are looking for the way into "entrepreneurial self-employment". Not unusually, their dreamed-of independence ends in an enormous mountain of debt. Their social situation resembles that of wage workers, the level of self-exploitation is perhaps higher. Among the small self-employed workers, too, the recognition is growing that solidarity is necessary, and left-wing political awareness too. They should therefore also be incorporated in a policy of alliances in the interest of wage workers.

6. A Marxist-Leninist party is fundamentally a party of the working class and all those working strata affected by the intensified exploitation conditions of finance capital and monopoly capital. For these strata it is not a question of victims of some kind of modernisation, but of old but newly intensified exploitation. The party sees itself as the mouthpiece of the interests of workers, employees, low-ranking civil servants and small self-employed and "pseudo-self-employed", and seeks to develop a policy for and with them in order to lead a common fight for better working and living conditions, with the perspective for a completely different social order, for socialism.

7. The "defensive struggle" against further worsening of employment and social-welfare law must be led in an organised way. The coming attacks on employment-law guarantees, on collective agreements and minimum-wage rates, redundancy payments, social and pension insurance, etc, must be hindered with by all legislative and political means. This can only be achieved through more pressure on the trade unions from the left and through the extension of progressive positions in factories and workers’ representation.

8. Atypical and precarious employment conditions must be combated by all possible means: through argumentation with false, illusory consciousness, through their transformation into standard employment contracts with the aid of legal actions under employment law, through the struggle for employment and social-security standards for the "pseudo-self-employed". In the process, the remaining employment and social-security legislation must be used to the fullest extent possible, otherwise it will become dead law, and it must not be allowed to be further eroded by the reactionary fractions of capital.

9. It is a question of strengthening the courage of working people to defend themselves, at least to use existing employment law. The precondition for this is the strengthening of solidarity consciousness within the individual sectors of the working class and with regard to the others. Small self-employed, trades-people and artists must also be incorporated in this solidarity, as they are likewise increasingly being proletarianised by their social situation.

10. The questions of redistribution of property from above to below, the taxation of the great fortunes and assets must be part of our strategy in the struggle for the rights of the working class. This policy, however, must also include the social environment of the working class: the systems of education and further education, cultural habits, living and housing conditions. The concept of work must not here be limited to pure paid labour but must also include the area of reproductive work carried out primarily by women within the strata of wage-earning and working people.

11. Our aim remains a revolutionary transformation of society into a socialist society in which the alienation of labour will be gradually overcome, in which profit will no longer be highest dictum and the exploitation of people by people disappears. In the development of this objective it is also a question of constantly demonstrating the inhumanity of capitalism in the global but also in the Austrian context.

Helmuth Fellner

Secretary of the Communist Initiative of Austria