About Us

The project to build an International Red Help began in autumn 2000. This platform was reworded in April 2016 on the base of the platform that was adopted in December 2000 and on the base of 15 years of experience in building an international organization for class solidarity.

As the bourgeoise repression deepens and spreads its offensive by making itself even more transnational, the organisation of class solidarity accross the borders becomes a vital necessity. The International Red Help includes the class solidarity against repression as a part of the revolutionary struggle.

Its activity aims to:

• raise the capacities of resistance of the struggle movements against repression through the analysis of the evolution and progress (technical, legal, organizational) of repression and of the means of resistance.
• support the revolutionary militants as much as the inprisoned fighters of the national liberation struggles, workers, unemployed, students, young people and women among the popular masses, repressed for their anticapitalist, antifascist and anti-imperialist activities (strikes, demonstrations, etc.) This support may take different forms (political, economical, legal, support to relatives of the prisoners) but always keeps political dimension and definition.
• recognize revolutionary militants and inprisoned fighters of the national liberation struggles as a valuable patrimony of the class struggle and of the experience of the proletarian revolution. As a living presence of the current redefinition of the revolutionary camp. As a strong presence in the search of new revolutionary progress.

They are the expression of the most advanced attempts that have developed in some imperialist countries, especialy where the question of the revolutionary violence has been bravely faced as an inseparable aspect of the revolutionary process to tear down the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Their prison conditions and the repressive fury against them are the most visible part of the whole repressive politics that target the whole workers class. Hence the necessity to unite the different subjects of this political class repression.

Are considered as political prisoners: all revolutionary militants jailed because of their political and politico-military activities, all the workers, farmers, unemployed, students, young people and women of the popular masses and others, persecuted and inprisoned in the frame of the anticapitalist, antifascist and anti-imperialist struggles. Where there is oppression, there is resistance. To the resistance of the oppressed, the bourgeoisie opposes its repression, whatever the direction of their regimes: fascist, reactionary or so-called democratic.

The IRH supports the fighters that are inprisoned because of the anticapitalist struggle and of the national liberation struggle when it is a step on the path to socialism, on the basis of the criteria of the weakening and the strengthening of the workers movement as a whole. The IRH excludes of its supports all prisoners that are struggling for reactionary, obscurantist and antipopular causes, such as chauvinism, religion or racism.

The IRH affirms that solidarity towards prisoners must be the common place where political, ideological and organizational divergences must be the least influential. The duty of unity around the prisoners against repression brings the IRH to -in advance- reject the possibility of a stance in an internal conflict inside the revolutionary movement, wheter inside an organization or between two organizations.

The International Red Help defends the political identity of the revolutionary prisoners, works at making their reality known by the struggling masses, demands the release of sick prisoners, supports their claims and their struggles, denounces all forms of isolation, all forms of torture, the long terms, the so-called “safety” measures, the restrictions to conditional liberation, the exception laws, the double penalty, the deportations and the extraditions.

The building process of an IRH can only exist if the different political projects are loyally cooperating to strictly apply the platform and the framework of the IRH. The International Red Help activity is neither humanitarian aid nor charity, it is political. It is not neutral, it is part of the great anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and antifascist movement aiming to overthrow exploitation and oppression.

It obviously means that the constituent forces have their own political projects and strategies in the anticapitalist struggle. And it is logical that these forces are considering the IRH as an element in a global revolutionary strategy. This “instrumentation” of the IRH is legitimate as long as:

• there is a strict respect of the IRH platform.
• the IRH is not involved in line struggles or transformed into a battlefield to serve line struggles.

The constituent forces of the IRH are different:

• because their natures are different: some are linked to organizations and therefore have well-defined political identities, others gather members with various political identities.
• because their political identities are different.
• because their militant realities are different: some groups are very important in terms of numbers, others are small, some are old, others are new, etc.
• because they come from different countries and have different histories, therefore have a specific “political culture”.
• because they have specific subjective realities, because they are in specific objective realities, because their developpements are unequal.

That’s why, over the years and the conferences, work and discussion methods as well as management strategies of divergences have been developed. These methods have become an integral part of the building process of the IRH. Only are allowed in this process the forces that approve, assimitale and apply these methods.

The IRH is not questionning the fundamental importance of the line struggles in the revolutionary movement. The current situation of the revolutionary movement and the number of unresolved strategic and tactival questions are necessarly calling this kind of debates and struggles. But they should drive the revolutionary struggle and not brake the solidarity.

The unity around the questions of methods is to be discovered through common practice. Besides an agreement on the principles, the establishing of a work relationship is an essential condition to any approach of a force to the IRH. The privileged space of these work relationships is the participation to the thematic, international and punctual campaigns, engaged by the IRH (sometimes by the call of one of its member, sometimes by the call of its international secretariat). The way the groups take part (according to their means) to the international solidarity campaigns has proved to be a good evaluation criterion.

The IRH is a part of the tradition of one of the most beautiful experiences of the international communist movement: the International Red Help as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s, as much as the attempts to rebuild it in the 1970s. It is not a matter of reproducing this experience, as conditions have changed, but to learn the lessons and to assume the heritage and to link it to a perspective.