Take Back What The Billionaires Have Stolen! The Path To Victory In the Global Strike Wave

In April 2023, the world is ablaze with workers’ collective anger and collective action. A global strike wave on a scale not seen since 1968 is sweeping Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. In France, Germany, the UK, Iran, Israel, Sri Lanka, Peru and elsewhere, repeated general strikes have mobilized millions of workers in the past month. On a single day, March 27, there were simultaneous general strikes in France, Germany and Israel, while in the previous history of the workers’ movement there have never been even two simultaneous general strikes.
Occupations of the universities, high schools and some refineries are spreading in France, as in May, 1968, when 10 million workers were on strike and thousands of factories occupied. In Israel, large sections of the military have sided with the strikers while in Iran, the top generals are alarmed by widespread refusal by members of the army to fire on protestors. In these three countries, the mass strikes are challenges not just to policies but to the regime.
The basic issues throughout the global strike wave are the same—the fight against attacks on workers’ wages, pensions, educational and health systems and against the blatantly authoritarian methods used to impose these massively unpopular attacks. In Iran and Israel, workers are fighting the same theocratic/kleptocratic regimes dressed in different religious colors. Elsewhere, the strike wave is battling assaults that are naked of any ideological or democratic disguise—imposed by decree in France, by coup in Peru.
The capitalist regimes that have launched these attacks on working-class standards of living worldwide say that there is no money to support pensions, wages, health and education. They are lying. The world capitalist class, the billionaires, that control these regimes have the money and they have stolen it from us. Since 2008, and especially since 2020, the governments controlled by the capitalists have stolen trillions of dollars in public funds and brazenly, publicly, given them to the banks and other financial institutions, and through them to the billionaires. These trillions have been the sole source of funds for the bankrupt financial system.
Now a third round of theft is starting. In just the first week after the default of the Silicon Valley Bank in early March, the Federal Reserve, the Swiss National Bank and other central banks poured more than half a trillion of public funds into a new bailout of the billionaires and their bankrupt banks.
The unified voice of the Iranian revolutionary movement has raised the demand to take back what has been stolen. In the Charter of Minimum demands adopted Feb. 16, 2023 through a democratic process by 20 popular organizations leading the revolution, the central economic demand, #9, is “Confiscation of the assets of the natural and legal persons and state, parastatal, and private institutions which have pillaged the shared assets and wealth of the people... The proceeds of these confiscations must immediately go towards the modernization and reconstruction of the educational system, pension funds, the environment.” The charter has called on workers everywhere to join with them “to carry the banner of these minimum demands to the summits of the fight for freedom, from the factory and university to the schools and neighborhoods and on the global stage.”
The world working class can unite behind this slogan raised by the Iranian revolution to say in one mighty voice “Take back what the billionaires have stolen.” Seize the banks, don’t bail them out! Take into public ownership the entire failed financial system. Take back all the trillions that the billionaires have stolen and use them to fund increased wages, good jobs for all, pensions, free education, free health care, a gigantic expansion of free housing, clean energy and a restored environment—the critical needs of humanity!
History has shown that when strike movements begin to raise positive demands, demands for what we want, not just what we oppose, the ruling class trembles. The escalation of demands makes concessions more and more costly to them and spreads the movement further and further. The adoption of sweeping positive demands leads to victories.
Activists in every country can support and contribute to the victory of the global mass strike wave by joining with the Iranian revolutionary organizations in calling on their own mass organizations to adopt the slogan “Take back what the billionaires have stolen” in their own struggles.
In France, the adoption of the demand to take back what has been stolen for the needs of the workers, can become the central unifying call as the movement passes to the offensive. The democratic debate and adoption of this demand by general assemblies and committees of action is a first step in establishing the program for the emerging revolutionary movement and the institutions of working class power. The movement has already taken the first steps in this direction by targeting Blackrock, the main conduit of much of the theft.
Concretely, we can demand that the orderly seizure of the banks can be carried out by central banks simply selling en-mass their trillions of holdings in corporate bonds. The very start of this process will instantly erase the solvency of all major financial institutions, which have been propped up only by the mass infusion of public funds. The insolvent institutions can then can be seized by the governments.
Of course, the seizure of the banks and other financial institutions will be only a first step in redirecting the real resources to real needs. For that process to happen fully, the workers’ movement will have to develop the new democratic organs that will control both the financial institutions, and the vast swaths of the rest to the economy that they now own. But such democratic institutions of economic control will emerge from the very struggle for these demands.
In the United Kingdom, the discussion and adoption of this slogan can weld the already powerful strike movement into an unstoppable force.
Even in the United States, where no mass movement yet exists, there is enormous potential that the outrage from the emerging mass bailouts, in tandem with nationwide austerity attacks, including throwing 15 million people off of Medicaid, can be focused by this slogan into unified actions of mass protest and strikes. In the US, as well as elsewhere, activists can propose that their mass organization democratically discuss and adopt “Take back what the billionaires have stolen” as a goal of the organization that can become a fighting demand in local and regional struggles.
For example, in New York State, the (Democratic) Governor has launched an assault on public education, saying there is not enough money. But a 5% per annum wealth tax on just the richest 1% of New York taxpayers would raise more than $160 billion per year, allowing a 70% increase in the state budget and funding free quality education at all levels for all, free health care and a massive increase in public housing. If unions, student and community organizations united on the slogan “Take back what the billionaires have stolen”, a wealth tax could be the embodiment, as a concrete demand, of a unified state-wide movement. Such a tax would raise about $8,000 per year per capita, $25,000 per household anywhere in the US.
“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold.” The global strike wave is beginning to show that power. Let’s use it now to take back what the billionaires have stolen.
Statement of the International Luxemburgist Network, April 29, 2023
Jay Arena (College of Staten Island; member, ILN),Eric Lerner (scientist, LPPFusion; member, ILN), Hoang Minh Uyen LY (researcher, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; member, ILN), Kazem Nik-khah (Worker-communist Party of Iran), Peter Ranis, (Graduate Center, CUNY, emeritus), Avram Rips (Special Education Itinerant Teacher, NYC), Bahram Soroush (Worker-communist Party of Iran), Leah Weich, (Politics for Human Community)