Post-1968 France
La Gauche Prolétarienne
Source: GP site;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.
The Gauche Prolétarienne didn’t restrict itself to written propaganda. As the “Spontaneous Expression Collection” they also released a number of records. The song “New Partisans” neatly sums up their ideas. The explanatory text was on the record sleeve.
Production of records that won’t find their place in the current commercial system, which is too often based on profit and the dulling of the individual, and distributed outside traditional circuits.
These 6 records aren’t perfect. They have the merit of existing ,of being sold for 3 francs and of creating a new way of operating.
Don’t put these records in your library. They are neither museum objects nor instruments of propaganda, but rather a vehicle of living thought and spontaneous expression.
Play them in your workplace, in high schools, factories, offices, buildings. Don’t forget; you are distribution!
Listen to our voices
That rise up from the factories,
Our proletarian voices
That say we're fed up.
Fed up with getting up
Every day at 5:00
To take a bus, a train
Stuffed in like cattle.
Fed up with the machine
That makes our heads drunk.
Fed up with bosses,
With stopwatches that kill us.
Fed up with the life of a slave,
Of a life in misery.
Listen to our voices,
They announce war!
We are the new partisans
Resistance fighters of the class war!
The people’s camp is our camp
We are the new partisans!
Look at the exploited
When he comes home at night,
And look at the women
Who drudge away all their lives.
You who slobber on us
Who say that we become bourgeois,
Why don’t you go down into the mine
Six hundred meters deep!
It’s not on your rugs
That people die of silicosis.
You count your profits,
We count our wounded.
Watch us grow old
To the rhythm of the speed up,
Bosses, look at us,
It’s war that begins.
And you the prison guards of the working class
You line your pockets at our expense, that doesn’t bother you.
Your union full-timers tell us to play belote
And speak in our name in the boss’s office.
Vote, manipulate, begin Grenelle [1] again;
You won’t fool us,
This doesn’t work any more.
There are only two camps
You are no longer in ours!
We'll make war on the collaborators!
Stroll a little in the putrid dorms
Where they take turns sleeping round the clock
The revolt that’s rumbling in the Black dorms of Ivry
Announces vengeance for the dead of Aubervilliers.
It’s revolt also in the heart of the slums
Where poverty is mixed in with illness.
But all the immigrant workers are our brothers
United together with them, we declare war on you.
Violence is everywhere, you taught us this,
Bosses who exploit and cops who club.
But to your oppression we cry out: Resistance!
You expel Kader, Mohammed rises!
The revolt of the people can’t be expelled,
Of a people who prepare to take up arms again
That the traitors stole from them in ‘45.
Yes, bourgeois, against you the people want war!
1. Agreements signed in May 1968 granting workers a 10% pay raise and the guarantee of a minimum wage.