French socialists lose momentum

French socialists lose momentum

This has been taken from Permanent Revolution http://www.permanentrevolution.net


If the latest polls are anything to go by, Ségolène Royal is fast losing her chances of becoming France’s first woman president. Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the right and current interior minister, is 10 points ahead of the Socialist Party’s candidate, at 55%, and likely to beat Royal in a second round run-off, writes Christina Duval.

Last weekend in Villepinte, a suburb north of Paris, Royal unveiled the Socialist Party’s presidential programme. Since then her campaign has been floundering badly. Not only has she to contend with falling support in the opinion polls, but also with a party apparatus which is clearly not behind her – last week Eric Besson, a leader of the Parti Socialiste (PS) and advisor on the economy, resigned his leadership position for “personal reasons”.

The programme outlined at Villepinte represented an attempt to mobilise the PS around her campaign, by straddling the two main trends of thought within the PS, the social democrats and the social liberals. However, as is normally the case with such compromises, Royal suceeded in pleasing no one. Despite a nod in the direction of the left, with measures such as free health care for the under 16s, free contraception for young women under 25, and a program of social housing, underpinning her speech was the oft-repeated appeal to accept and embrace business, presented as the risk-taking creator of jobs, to whom the French should be grateful.

Fortunately, her call to put an end to endless conflict will be roundly ignored by the French working class who regularly appreciate the need to withdraw their labour against attacks by the government and employers.Royal announced other measures which are mere sops rather than serious responses to social injustice.
None go anywhere near to dealing with the growing inequality that French workers and youth experience. In response to the burning problem of low wages, she proposed, a minimum wage of 1500 Euros gross (£1000) with no calendar set for its introduction.

Unemployment is to be dealt with by a conference of “social partners” – a powerless taking shop – which is unlikely to put an end to the continued state subsidies that employers receive whilst continuing to sack workers. For the education sector, more classroom assistants are promised, rather than investing in more teachers. For the youth, Ségo promised an “allocation d’indépendance”, a financial benefit, of no fixed amount as yet, in exchange for taking part in some form of training and actively seeking employment (i.e. being ready to take on any job, no matter how bad the conditions and pay), and the creation of 500,000 jobs for youth, the details of which are unclear. These “emplois-tremplins” are likely to imitate similar initiatives in socialist held regions of France, which, whilst they are permanent jobs (unlike the proposed Contrats Premiere Emplois or CPE which brought hundreds of thousands of youth out into to streets last year in protest), are nothing more than subsidised labour for the employers – only 10% of the wages in current “emplois tremplins” are paid by the bosses.

Royal made no mention of privatisation or the attacks on public services, which French workers have been taking to the streets against. Nor did Royal deal with the thorny question of pensions. Such omissions were conscious, since her speech was designed to appeal to bosses and workers alike…. by being vague. However, clearly the privatisations and attacks on public services will continue under a Royale presidency. How else will the meagre reforms outlined above be financed? In fact, Royal hinted as much when she pledged to put an end to “waste” in the public sector to release the funds necessary for her reforms. Her attacks on the “Jacobin”, centralised state and the need to encourage “civic responsibility” as opposed to state dependency are straight out of Blairite New Labour. Though, as workers in the UK know well enough, when it comes to the law and order side of state responsibility, the reverse is true for these half-hearted socialists.

In the absence of a united candidate arising out of the recent and ongoing struggles of French workers and youth, capable of raising demands that challenge the economic and political power of the French capitalist class, workers are faced with a PS candidate standing on a barely left reformist platform as their only rampart against the right.

The key task for the working class in such a situation is to create the organs of struggle necessary to take on whichever President they are saddled with, and in doing so take the next steps to create a workers party capable of uniting workers and youth around a programme of working class power.

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Why we support Besancenot

France
Presidential elections: Why we support Besancenot
Fred Leplat


The French presidential elections, with the first round is on April 22, will be an important milestone for the political forces of both the left and the right. Although there are over 36 individuals vying to get the administrative sponsorships of at least 500 mayors to be on the ballot paper, the main battle lines are clear.
The current Minister of the Interior, Nicholas Sarkozy, has been able to establish himself as the candidate of the mainstream neo-liberal right against both the Prime Minister Dominique Villepin – currently embroiled in the “Clearstream” corruption investigation – and President Jacques Chirac, who has lost all credibility.
Sarkozy sets himself out to be hard on law and order, by making provocative remarks aimed at attracting supporters of the neo-Nazi National Front.
During the revolt of the working class suburbs in the winter of 2005, he said that he was going “to clean out the scum from the area with high pressure water hoses”. This language has legitimised hard right ideas with the National Front maintaining its position in opinion polls and resulted in the Socialist Party being dragged to the right.
Sarkozy has also embraced a hard version of the neo-liberal economic agenda from North America. He has warned that it is necessary to reform “the French model” to face the challenge of capitalist globalisation.
This will lead to more attacks on pay, pensions, the length of the working week and a reduction on taxes for the rich.
The main parliamentary party on the left, the Socialist Party, has failed to challenge the drive to the right by Sarkozy. The new leader, Segolene Royal, has modelled herself on Blair.
She has dropped all mention of specific economic or social measures, and instead uses vague phrases about the ‘need to listen’ and for ‘modernisation’.
The left of the Socialist Party, which campaigned for a No vote in the referendum for the European Constitution in April 2005, has thrown itself wholeheartedly behind Segolene Royal.
The strategy fails to mount any effective challenge to the neo-liberal right; this is confirmed by Royal trailing Sarkozy in the opinion polls by at least 5 per cent.
The mobilisations over the last two years, starting with the European referendum in April 2005, then with the student strike against new youth job contracts in spring 2006, and continuing now with the fight against privatisation, had brought the left and raised the possibility of a unitary candidate for the presidential elections to oppose neo-liberalism.
Arising out of the previous struggles, over 700 local committees set themselves up last to explore the way forward. They included the Communist Party, the LCR (French section of the Fourth International), ecologists as well as members of the more radical unions such as the FSU, SUD and CGT.
Marie-George Buffet (general secretary of the CP) and Jose Bove announced that they were putting their names forward to be considered as candidates by the committees, together with a number of other less well-known candidates. Then shortly before the November 2006 national meeting of the committees which was due to make a decision, Bove withdrew his name
The LCR had started to collect the nominations of mayors from early 2006 in support of its own candidate, Olivier Besancenot, but it also stated that it would withdraw him if an agreed candidate was found who would be clear on non-participation in an SP government. It stated that it did not think that the known spokesperson of a political party could be a credible candidate of such a unitary process.
Although the committees adopted a programme of action known as the “125 Propositions” that broke with neo-liberalism, the national meetings continually avoided discussing proposals from the LCR that any joint candidate should refuse to participate in a Socialist Party government or be part of its parliamentary group.
This crucial discussion was manoeuvred off the agenda by the Communist Party, while others such as Jose Bove remained silent. Given the experience of the left in Lula’s Brazilian government and of Rifondazione in Prodi’s government in Italy, this is the issue which cannot be ducked by those committed to building a political opposition to neo-liberalism.
In a vote of the local committees for the unitary candidate, the CP national secretary Buffet was able to get 55%. This vote was felt by many to have been achieved by packing local meetings and the creation of local collectives that comprised CP members only.
The CP then tried to get the endorsement of its membership for Buffet as the candidate of the left against neo-liberalism.
Although 99% of CP members were originally in favour of putting Buffet’s name forward, over 20,000 members in this second vote either abstained or voted No, and six resigned from its National Executive Committee. These events in November of last year disappointed activists in the 2007 Left Alternative, to the extent that Bove withdrew his name as a possible candidate.
However in January 2007, an internet campaign was started up for Bove to be the candidate of the committees. This culminated at the end of January at a national meeting of some 300 of the local committees which endorsed Bove as the candidate and called on Buffet and Besancenot to withdraw.
Although the field on the anti-globalisation left seems to be crowded with candidates, which taken together score around 10% in the polls, there are nevertheless some clear differences.
Marie-George Buffet has got the 500 sponsorships … not difficult as her party has several thousand elected representatives entitled to give them, and is being presented by her party as the “unitary” candidate of the anti-neoliberal left, even though the committees are not backing her.
But her claim that the CP represents an alternative to neo-liberalism has been severely dented by refusing to state clearly that she would refuse to participate in a SP government and by CP councillors participating in coalition administrations of local towns which are carrying through neo-liberal policies.
Bove, who has yet to get the 500 sponsorships necessary by March 19, supports a programme against neo-liberalism and has stated on some occasions that it is impossible to consider a governmental or parliamentary agreement with the Socialist Party. Although a campaigner against globalisation and in defence of the environment, he has not had the same profile that Besancenot has amongst youth and the union movement.
There is also Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere, who has been standing for the last 30 years. She has got a loyal electorate of at least 2%, and has got the nominations required to be on the ballot. However, Lutte Ouvriere has been totally absent from the debates on the left and is quietly ploughing its own field.
Besancenot, the candidate of the LCR, has already got over 400 nominations and has been touring the country where workers have been fighting back such as Quebecor in Lille and Nestle in Quimperle. Local meetings have also been impressive in size, such as the one at the end of January in Gerardemer, a town of 10,000 in Alsace, where over 450 came to hear Besancenot even though it was snowing and the temperature was minus 5.
With the drift towards neo-liberalism of the Socialist Party, dragging in its wake the Communist Party, there is a crying need for a unitary candidate to unite the French left. A “crying need”, however, does not resolve the practical problem as to who that candidate should or could be.
This is the problem that has divided the LCR for months. Buffet is politically unacceptable given that she would participate in an SP government given half a chance and Bove, whilst being able and an activist of the global justice movement, is somewhat of an unreliable maverick.
Besancenot, the candidate of the LCR, is on the other hand the best candidate on offer both in terms of his politics and his popular appeal, though he would never be accepted as such by the other organisations. In the current situation, the best way to strengthen the resistance to neo-liberalism is to see the biggest possible vote for Besancenot.

GÉRARD SCHIVARDI : candidate of the PT

The candidate of the French PT in the upcoming elections...

Gerard Schivardi

On the French Left: what’s going on?

France

On the French Left: what’s going on?


François Duval

The political divisions on the left in France in the run-up to the Presidential elections have provoked much debate internationally. François Duval, from the LCR national leadership recently set out the position of the LCR in a report to the European Anti-capitalist Left.
Many friends from the anti-capitalist Left in Europe (and elsewhere) are worried about what’s happening now in France and are asking questions about the political orientation and behaviour of the LCR. [1] This document intends to give some information in order for "non French readers" to understand the French situation, and some explanations about the way the LCR has tried to deal with it.

There is no doubt about it: having - at least! - four candidates to the left of social-democracy standing for the next presidential election (end of April 2007) is not the best thing that could have happened! So, inevitably, it raises some questions, such as:
Regroupments of the Left and/or united coalitions have been possible in various European countries such as England and Wales with Respect, or Germany with the WASG/Linkspartei. So why not in France?
Is the LCR responsible for that? Has the LCR wasted a major opportunity to reshape the French left? As you probably guess, we plead "not guilty"!
A dramatic situation in France? Yes, but...

First of all, it is necessary to provide a more complete and better-balanced approach to the long-lasting trends of the French situation. One generally considers that since 1995 there is a rich and powerful social movement in France with big strikes and huge demonstrations, and even political successes for the Left. And one could easily enumerate:

The result gained by Arlette Laguiller [2] for the presidential election in 1995;

The strikes and demonstrations against the government six months later;

The election of five revolutionary MPs [3] to the European Parliament in 1999;

The cumulated results of revolutionary candidates in the presidential election in 2002: 10% of votes. Even 13% if you add the result of the CP leader.

The huge strikes of March and April 2003: almost a general strike;

The victory of the "No" during the referendum on the neo-liberal European constitution, on 29 May 2005;

The rebellion of the youth and riots in the French suburbs, in November 2005;

The victory of youth and workers’ movement against CPE [4] in May 2006.

All these events are very important. They show the strength of the resistance - both social and political resistance - against liberalism and corporate capitalism. They obviously suggest the need for a political expression through the emergence of a political alternative, embodied by a new broad anti-capitalist party, a new political representation for the exploited and the oppressed.

But these events are just one side of the situation. If you look at the other side of the situation, you will see an especially low level of "days of work lost because of strikes", a succession of neo-liberal reforms that have been implemented through workers’ defeats - or even without any resistance at all -, a very limited membership of unions and parties, a growing rate of abstention for elections, an avalanche of laws in favour of cops and against youngsters and immigrants, an uninterrupted shift to the right of the political elite, including the leadership of trade unions and the social-democrat party. And so on ...
In the political and electoral arena, real life has not been a continuous increase of the results for the radical and/or revolutionary Left. A few weeks after the presidential election in 2002, for general elections, the cumulated results of the LCR and LO (Lutte Ouvrière) represented an average rate of 2.5%. In 2004, common slates (LCR and LO) reached an average rate of 3 to 5%.
In fact the situation in France is more complex and contrasted:

On one side, long periods where everything is "quiet": no strike, no movement and hard attacks from right wing parties and bosses.
But, on the other side, (very) short periods of impetuous social explosion.
It does not mean a "downturn", like in the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s. But, at least, it means that the situation is unstable and volatile. The short periods of social explosion have not succeeded in reversing the relationship of forces between the ruling classes and the working class. And because the periods of social movements are intense but very short, the lessons drawn by significant sectors of the working class or even groups of activists are very heterogeneous. That is the first substantial obstacle confronting any attempt to change resistance into a political alternative. And that point really explains a lot of things that have happened since May 2005!

After the victory

Actually, after 29 May 2005, we have been faced with a succession of missed rendezvous, false hopes and distorted debates. To put it simply, it was not so easy - and perhaps impossible - to change the coalition against the European Constitution into an electoral coalition for 2007.
The revolutionary Left (mainly the LCR), the French CP, a platform inside the Green Party, a platform inside the Socialist Party, activists from the trade unions movement, from associations, from the feminist movement, from the global justice movement and thousands of ordinary people with left wing ideas agreed to campaign against the EU Constitution. Obviously, that was the rich basis we had to build on. But some political clarifications were needed.
A shared refusal of the neo-liberal European Constitution does not mean that all these people could automatically ¬ or, even, easily - agree on a common approach for elections. More precisely: specific elections, general elections, where what is at stake is political power, government, parliamentary majority. Or, to say it with "old" words: state power.
The most widely shared explanation for the failure of the process for a common candidate of the anti-liberal Left is: because of the sectarianism of LCR and/or because of the hegemonic behaviour of the French CP (and its desire to keep control of the movement).
This explanation is so widely shared because it is a simple one, it is an easy one and it is a comfortable one. I don’t share that explanation. Precisely because I feel it is too simple, too easy and too comfortable. And is not - political!

If the only problem has been the sectarianism of the LCR, then what would have occurred? A united coalition and a common candidate of everybody from the anti-liberal Left, eventually without the LCR! But that did not happen ...
If the only problem has been the hegemonic behaviour of the CP leadership, then what would have occurred? A united coalition and a common candidate of everybody from the anti-liberal Left, eventually without the CP! But that did not happen, either ...
My explanation is that the process for a united coalition and common candidates failed for substantial political reasons. It failed because there was - and there still is - a central political disagreement on a central political question: what kind of relationships can the anti-liberal movement have with the leadership of the Socialist Party, related to the issues of government, parliamentary majority and state power.

The sectarianism of the LCR, really?

Let’s make things as clear as possible! We think that our organisation has a good programme, built on social and democratic emergency measures. But, we were perfectly aware that a united anti-liberal coalition could not just endorse our programme! And we were ready to accept compromises, as long as the compromises were not opposed to our own proposals.
By the way, the 29 May collectives have adopted a programme. We agreed with many of their proposals. We also have differences. Just enumerate a few of them.

The LCR thinks that a genuine anti-liberal candidate must be clear on the level of minimum wage we are fighting for. Neither Marie-George Buffet nor Jose Bové is clear.

The LCR thinks that a genuine anti-liberal candidate must say clearly that he (or she) is in favour of getting rid of nuclear power as soon as possible. But the programme of the "29 May collectives" did not say that, mainly because the Communist Party is deeply involved in the pro-nuclear lobby!
The LCR thinks that a genuine anti-liberal candidate must not just act for the dissolution of imperialist coalitions: she (or he) must say clearly that France has to withdraw immediately from NATO, without waiting for any consensus on that issue with other European countries.
But, during the debates about the programme for election, the LCR has not made any overbidding. We just stated that these points (and some others) were not an absolute obstacle for a united coalition, but temporarily unsolved questions we could deal with.

Of course, the main problem was not that these very "cautious" ideas were not shared among the activists of the "anti-liberal collectives". Most of them agreed with our more advanced demands. The main problem was the orientation of the CP, which was also by far the main political current involved in the process.
So, during several months, in Spring 2006, the LCR tried seriously to organise an open and honest debate with the CP. Common working groups were planned, with two or three "experts" of the CP and two or three "experts" from the LCR, on each topic, in order to establish the list of measures everybody could agree on and the list of measures that needed additional work or compromises. Some of these groups met once or twice - until the CP decided that there were no reasons to discuss with the LCR and that it was a better idea to discuss with "people"!

The scenario, not the cast

For months, everybody seemed to agree: a political agreement was the most important issue, not the name of the common candidate.
The LCR thought that its own candidate, Olivier Besancenot, was a good candidate, perhaps the best among the various leaders of the anti-liberal movement. Olivier is very popular among workers and young people. But he is our best-known spokesperson and, for that reason, we were perfectly aware he could not be the candidate of a united anti-liberal coalition. We were ready for a compromise, for another candidate. Even after having announced his candidature, we said clearly that we were ready to withdraw his candidature at any moment if a political agreement was found.
But, yes: there was a single issue about which we were not ready to make a compromise. Not an unlimited series of pretexts: just one simple and single issue that needed - and still needs - an answer, a clear answer, an answer without any ambiguity. As you have surely understood it, the question we raised from the beginning of the process has remained the same: the question of the relationship with the SP, related to government and Parliament.

And the answer we wanted to hear was: no, an anti-liberal candidate will not be member of a government led by the SP. No anti-liberal candidates for general elections, if elected as MPs, will either belong to the same parliamentary majority or support a government led by the SP.
We have not heard such an answer.
Distorted debate
The debate on this issue raged during the first part of 2006. Once again, the main problem was not the average mood of activists from the anti-liberal collectives. A significant number of them more or less shared our point of view, even when they thought that we were exaggerating the importance of that issue. The main problem was ¬ and still remains ¬ the political approach of the CP.
The leaders of the French CP have a two-faced speech. On one side, they reaffirm that they don’t want to reiterate the experience of the so-called "plural left" government between 1997 and 2002, when they participated in Jospin’s government and a parliamentary majority with the SP and were obliged to endorse its social-liberal program. The end of that experience was the electoral disaster of April 2002.

But, on the other side, they pretend that it is possible to gather "all the left on an anti-liberal programme", that it is possible to conciliate the parties which were in favour of the No to the referendum and those which were in favour of the Yes! They have not given up the hypothesis of being again members of a government led by the SP.
This was the reason why we tried to have an open and honest debate with the CP on that issue. Both the LCR and the CP agreed to write a document about how each party considers the issue of political power, coalition, common government, and so on. After a little while, the leadership of the LCR wrote this document, specifying our conditions for belonging to a common government. The document was passed and sent to the CP. The CP neither wrote any document nor answered to our own document.

Turning point

The next step was the debate about that issue inside the National Collective and the hundreds of collectives. This debate ended in September 2006 when the National Conference of the "anti-liberal collectives" adopted a document entitled "Ambition and strategy". This document included ambiguous formulas about the hegemony of "social-liberalism". But it does not clearly state that it will be impossible to join a SP government, nor to support it in the framework of a common parliamentary majority with the really existing SP, its programme and its leadership.
The LCR proposed amendments in order to clarify the issues. These amendments were neither accepted by the national Collective nor submitted to the vote of National Conference of the "anti-liberal collectives". A quite similar amendment from a collective from the South East of France was moved out of the way as well. Another amendment from the same collective specifying that the "common candidate cannot be the spokesperson of a political party" was also eliminated in the same way.

That conference was the turning point of the process: our partners from the anti-liberal coalition against the EU constitution decided to get rid of the LCR. It is not paranoia ... though even paranoid persons sometimes have genuine enemies! The main purpose of the other political currents and the other members of the National Collective was not to get rid of the LCR. But they thought that the choice was between keeping the LCR and pushing aside the CP, or keeping the CP and pushing aside the LCR, hoping that sooner or later the LCR will join. But we didn’t. Because ... we believe in political ideas!
Many people in the collectives said that, in fact, the document approved by the National Conference should satisfy us. But a few days afterwards, several speeches and articles from CP leaders confirmed our fears. They obviously had a different interpretation of what the collectives were supposed to have agreed on. And they insisted on the fact that the political orientation supported by the LCR had been defeated by the "collectives". Which, I think, was - unfortunately ¬ right.

That’s the reason why the LCR did not participate in the process of choosing a common candidate: from our point of view, the prerequisite was a political agreement and a shared position on the issue of the relationship with SP.

Misunderstanding

The decision of the National Collective to withdraw any amendment specifying that the spokesperson of a political party could not be the common candidate was another weakness in the process. Actually, the CP thought that, in the end, everybody would agree to support its candidate. And the other currents and the other members of the National Collective thought that, in the end, the CP would agree to withdraw its candidate! But that did not happen.
As usual, the CP wished to gain a unitary cover, but it also wanted to keep control of the movement. And the best way to do so was to have its own candidate standing on the behalf of the anti-liberal movement! It never intended to do anything different. And that is exactly what had happen...

The process blew up in November 2006 when the CP tried to impose its candidate, Marie-George Buffet, the general secretary of the CP. Of course, the CP used "post-Stalinist" methods to do so, such as a blossoming of "new" collectives populated with CP members in order to gain a majority for choosing the candidate. Some pre-existing and genuine collectives were suddenly invaded by CP activists who came to meetings just in time to vote for choosing the candidate. In some boroughs, local branches of the CP were hastily changed into anti-liberal collectives!
These old methods inherited from the Stalinist past of the CP have worried many people inside the collectives. But, actually, the CP leadership were encouraged to do so by the National Collective, when it decided to blank out and postpone the problem of the designation of the candidate.
Everybody (except us) was sure that the first steps of the process had been completed successfully: the anti-liberal movement had a strategic document and an electoral programme (adopted in October 2006). Deciding the name of the candidate would be the last and easy step...
But it is not so easy to get rid of political issues and political differences!

The question we raised had not been answered. It has led to our political eviction from the process. But the unsolved problem ¬ and the divergences between some activists and leaders of the anti-liberal process and the CP leadership ¬ has reappeared in the worst manner: the designation of the candidate. Almost 60% of consulted people were in favour of MG Buffet, which only illustrates the real ratio between CP membership and other people in the "collectives".
A major opportunity lost?

Would things have been different if the LCR have remained in the process and have been more involved in the collectives? It is not a serious statement.
For months, we saw reiterated signs that the CP wanted to have its own candidate and would not give any guarantees about its relationship with SP. The involvement of the LCR in the collectives could not change that. We are not so powerful!

Did we underestimate the "dynamic" of the anti-liberal movement after our common victory over the EU Constitution? I don’t think so.
This movement raised the issue of a political alternative and we have tried, with our own political orientation, to move forwards alongside people who came together during the campaign. But, as explained before, the prerequisite for a move forwards was political clarification on central issues.
Some people on the Left have argued that another approach was possible: anyhow, there is never an absolute guarantee. So the clever thing to do was to get involved in the process although its political bases were ambiguous, to rely on its dynamic and, eventually to break with the CP if our fears were confirmed. But life is not that simple.

The LCR has been under heavy pressure from all those who wanted a unique candidate, whatever the political basis would be. If we had accepted an ambiguous basis and got involved in the process, the pressure to remain in this framework would have been higher. If we had tried to break after a while, everybody would have reminded us: there is nothing new, you have accepted the basis, it¹s a betrayal! We wouldn’t have been better understood and we wouldn’t have made any demonstration ...

Have we underestimated the crisis inside the CP? I don’t think so.

After the disintegration of Soviet Union and the disastrous results of the former coalitions with the SP, this crisis is deeper than ever. Many CP members - and even elected MPs and mayors - are breaking with the CP leadership and its orientation. But this does not indicate the direction of their evolution: from right to left, or from left to right?
Of course, we hope that some of them could make a good choice: leaving the neo-reformist and post-Stalinist tradition in favour of the building of a new broad anti-capitalist party with others. But we must also consider that many of them ¬ just like the CP leadership ¬ need the support of the SP to be elected again. And that doesn’t lead them to move towards left!

In the past, smaller groups of activists or leaders have resigned or split from the CP. Some of them had really broken with Stalinism and were more open to work with the radical Left. But most of them were attracted by the SP and became its satellites.
Have we missed the opportunity to reshape the Left through the good electoral result of a common candidate?
Many people in the movement believed that a unitary candidate of the anti-liberal Left could have a good result because, in 2005, the majority of left voters, including SP voters, were against the EU Constitution. Some dreamed: more than 10% of the votes! Some even forecast that the anti-liberal candidate would have more votes that the social-democrat candidate! And this absolute lack of lucidity has been encouraged by CP leaders and the main spokespersons of the National Collectives ... For the worst possible reason: why worry about the relations with the SP if the anti-liberal candidate could win?

The LCR isolated?

Our campaign for the Presidential election has already started. The rallies and public meetings with Olivier Besancenot are significant successes. We are receiving encouraging letters and e-mails after each broadcast or TV talk-show or interview. He is warmly welcomed in workplaces and on demonstrations. Social questions and the fight against discriminations are the core of this campaign and thousands of workers, women and youngsters show their interest for that.
It is obviously too soon to establish a serious balance sheet on the orientation, the behaviour and the action of the LCR. The time will come, after the presidential and general election. Most probably, the conclusions will be: the LCR has not done everything in the best way and made some mistakes.
Obviously, the divisions among our own members have increased. Obviously, genuine activists of the anti-liberal movement, very good people, are angry against the CP, but they are also angry against the LCR. Obviously, we have not been understood and have been partly isolated. Obviously, that is not a good result and the failure of the attempt to have a genuine independent and anti-liberal coalition with a common candidate is a political defeat.
But regrets and sorrows are inefficient. It is more important to try to understand what happened. We have been partly isolated because we have raised some difficult and uncomfortable questions. It was not so popular to tell people and activists who desperately want a single candidate of the anti-liberal left that it was not so easy. It was not so popular to tell them that political clarifications were mandatory in order to build a long-lasting coalition. It was not so popular to tell them that the electoral results of an anti-liberal candidate, even a unitary and unique one, will not be fabulous. It was not so popular to tell them: although the majority of the people who usually vote for left-wing parties have voted against the EU Constitution, although the SP was in favour of the Constitution, nevertheless many of them will vote directly for the candidate of the SP for presidential election. It was not so popular to tell them: no, there will not be several dozens of anti-liberal candidates elected as MPs. It was not so popular to try to tell these things (which were true) to people who didn¹t want to hear them! Of course, our political function is not to smash the hopes of thousands of people. But we are not supposed to feed them with fanciful illusions!

J. Bové, the man we need?

After a lot of developments, the former peasant leader, José Bové, is now the fourth candidate of the anti-liberal" and/or radical Left. He is rather popular for his attacks against McDonalds, his campaigns against genetically modified crops and his involvement in the global justice movement. He is a courageous activist, who has been sent to jail once for several months and he is again under the threat of a new sentence. And, no doubt about that, he has the right to be a candidate, as a representative figure of a specific current (radical ecology, global justice, ...).

Bové, Besancenot and Buffet
But he is neither a unitary candidate nor a "natural" candidate of the anti-liberal movement or of the "29th May collectives". He is supported by none of the political parties or currents involved in the coalition against the EU Constitution: PRS ("for the social Republic"), a platform inside the SP, is now supporting the SP candidate; the LCR is supporting Olivier Besancenot; the CP is supporting Marie-George Buffet; and the small groups from the "republican left" (former supporters of JP Chevènement) don’t agree with his candidature. Only "The Alternatives", a small platform inside the Greens and a minority of the collectives are in favour of J. Bové.
The methods used to build this candidature are really worrying. Until November 2006, J. Bové was in competition with others to be the candidate of the collectives. Then, he decided to withdraw his candidature, most probably because the first results of the votes inside the collectives were not very good for him. After that, he said that he would stand only if Buffet and Besancenot withdrew.
Then, after the announcement of the candidature of the CP general secretary and the blowing out of the process for a unitary candidate, a petition was organised by his friends through websites and e-mails to ask him to be a candidate. And he finally decided to be a candidate!
This event is not the result of a democratic and contradictory debate inside the collectives; it is not the result of political confrontation and agreement between political parties. It is the result of a plebiscitary approach, based on the signature of an e-mail petition, with a nasty smell of "anti-parties" mood.
Everybody in the alternative Left must realise that political parties, even alternative and/or revolutionary ones, have disappointed people. But thinking that loose networks can replace them is a dangerous illusion, in terms of political efficiency and in terms of democracy as well.
This is important because the background of all these debates is about the type of new anti-capitalist movement or broad left party we want to build in the future. [5]
A fight for political independence
Just a few more words about the main question we have raised. The relation with the SP and the issues of government and parliamentary coalitions are not purely theoretical ones. They are not obsessions or nightmares born in the sick imagination of the LCR. They don’t rely on the so-called "French exception". They are real challenges for the Left, worldwide.
Revolutionary and/or radical groups have been already faced to these challenges: in Brazil and in Italy, for instance. Becoming satellites of social democracy via common governments or parliamentary coalitions with the centre left can end up with the destruction of the radical Left. We know for sure that new experiences of centre left governments will only lead to greater disappointment, greater bitterness and an increased support for populist and far right parties. If we want to avoid this, the radical Left must not share the responsibility of these social and political disasters.
The difficult debate we had in France was not about Reform and Revolution. It was not about "Party and Movement": the long-lasting tradition of the LCR is to build a (revolutionary) party in close relation with involvement in the movement(s), unitary coalitions and open regroupments.
It was not about "united front" versus sectarian isolation: from the 1970s until now, there is much evidence (such as our involvement in the 2005 campaign against the EU Constitution) that the LCR has always favoured the building of a unitary framework for action rather than the emphasis on our party.
It was not about the false polarity between opportunism and revolutionary purism. By the way, such a reproach - revolutionary purism - has rarely been addressed to LCR!
No, more modestly, it was about subordination to social democracy (and/or social-liberalism) or political independence!
Link: Visit the site of the Olivier Besancenot campaign.
François Duval is a leading member of the LCR (French section of the Fourth International).

NOTES

[1] LCR - Ligue communiste révolutionnaire - French section of the Fourth International.
[2] Candidate for Lutte Ouvrière (LO).
[3] On a joint slate between LO and the LCR.
[4] First Employment Contract.
[5] Those who want to know more about it can read the document written by Pierre Rousset - http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article4979.

Editorial from Socialist Viewpoint: The Meaning of the French Presidential Elections

The Meaning of the French Presidential Election


When Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party’s incumbent prime minister, decided to accept his party’s nomination for president of France, he never dreamed that he would come in third, with 16 percent of the vote. Neither could he have anticipated that the racist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, would have inched him out of the runoff with 17 percent of the vote cast. No less surprising was the 19 percent plurality received by the incumbent president of France, Jacques Chirac.
But what really shocked him and the capitalist world was the nearly three million votes (more than 10 percent of the total cast) received by two presidential candidates widely known in France as Trotskyists. Moreover their vote was three times greater than the 3.5 percent received by the Stalinist French Communist Party and more than one-half the vote received by the Socialist Party’s Jospin.


To add further to what pundits correctly characterize as a political earthquake, the combined votes of the incumbent president and his leading challenger, the incumbent prime minister, added up to just 35.6 percent of the total.
Thus both Chirac, the preferred candidate of the ruling capitalist class, and Jospin, who—despite his Socialist label, was nonetheless capitalism’s second choice for president—were repudiated by almost two thirds of those who voted. And when account is taken of the 28 percent of the eligible voters who abstained, a large majority of the working and middle classes of France overwhelmingly rejected the preferred candidates of French capitalism.


This election, however, only made visible what has been building up over the last few years. And the 10 percent vote received by the candidates who are on record in favor of socialist revolution made absolutely clear that the sharp decline in the vote for the Socialist and Communist Parties was not in any sense a rejection of socialism! Rather, it serves to prove the exact opposite; it proves that their supporters punished the two reformist parties—Socialists and Communists alike— because they betrayed the historic interests of the class they falsely claim to represent.
But France is hardly unique. The Socialist and Communist Parties of Europe follow exactly the same policies of putting the interests of their capitalists first, and that of the working masses second. Thus, their repudiation in France is at the same time a warning to their reformist counterparts in Europe who follow an identical policy of defending the capitalist status quo at the expense of the class interests of those who must work for a living.
Meanwhile, Le Pen, whose denunciations of the status quo from the right have always been given far greater coverage in the mass media than capitalism’s sharpest critics on the left, has also benefited from this latest expression of a deepening radicalization of mass consciousness in France, Europe and America.

The role assigned by capitalism to immigrant labor

In periods of relative economic equilibrium, such as has been the case in the world’s advanced industrial countries for an unusually prolonged period; working class leadership tends to reflect the thinking of its most privileged and backward sectors. And since all ruling classes—who are by nature a small minority—can only maintain control over the exploited and oppressed majority, primarily by the strategy of divide and conquer, racism, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of bigotry are built into capitalist society.
Moreover, because of the sharpening competition among the world’s richest countries for a larger share of the globalized marketplace, and because the average rate of profit has tended to fall, capitalists, especially in the world’s richest industrial nations have been intensifying their natural tendency to push down average wages as competition intensifies—especially in their own countries, where wages are the highest. One of the most important ways by which capitalism has historically undercut the average wage level is by importing workers from countries whose average wage level is among the world’s lowest.


That explains the steadily increasing rate of recruitment by all the imperialist countries of immigrants who, as impoverished strangers in a strange land, have no choice but to get work as best they can. And because of their extremely poor bargaining position they are compelled to accept wages, more often than not, far below the average. Thus, the lowest paid layers of the existing workforce are the first to be affected by the increased competition for jobs caused by the inflow of immigrants from the world’s poorest countries. That explains, in part, why the rate of unemployment in France stands at 9 percent and is increasing.
In addition to the economic slowdown that has affected the entire capitalist world, the increased supply of workers for fewer jobs—compounded by the frenetic pace of capitalism’s recruitment of immigrant laborers—also explains why capitalism and its racist agents have succeeded in deluding some indigenous workers into thinking that it is the immigrants that are the cause of their miseries, not the capitalists who profit from the influx of cheap labor.

Moreover, to make bad matters worse, imperialist capital had long ago destroyed the outmoded manufacturing and agricultural economies in their neo-colonies. And besides blocking new industrial development there, they have also destroyed the subsistence economies in their captive nations. Thus, the small subsistence farmers have been evicted from the land—and the land transformed from food production for local consumption to the large-scale production of agricultural raw materials and single-crop food products for export.
That, obviously, has produced an enormous “surplus” population in imperialism’s neo-colonies who have no way to eke out a living. Thus, it’s not only the hope for a better life in Europe or America that drives them there, it’s the desperate struggle for survival that causes virtually the entire plebian populations of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to resort to the most desperate measures to escape death by starvation, malnutrition and the diseases that accompany hunger.

Then to help make the new generation of immigrants permanently second class citizens in their adopted countries, the waves of immigrants are stereotyped and demonized so that their children and grandchildren are also permanently stigmatized and condemned to jobs on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
America, with its long history of recruiting one new wave of immigrants after another, has apparently served Europe as a model for their own racist and xenophobic policies and practices. After America’s indigenous inhabitants were steadily driven westward or exterminated, the ruling capitalist class instituted a long-term policy of recruiting waves of immigrants to make sure that there would always be more workers than jobs, and thereby let the economic law of supply and demand keep average wages as low as possible.

Once, however, the new immigrants to the United States learned their way around, learned the language and adopted the manner of dress and other superficial cultural attributes of “native” Americans, it was no longer easy to identify the demonized foreigner. And workers’ having learned from very bad experience that accepting the stigmatization of a sector of their class, helping to exclude them from “their” places of work, served to increase and maintain the conditions forcing immigrants to serve as a permanent supply of cheap labor. They learned that the best way to defend their class interests was to embrace the cause of those so victimized by capitalism. Indeed, it became necessary to champion the principle of equal rights for all workers regardless of their place of birth.

But American history also provided an exception to the rule in the unique resurrection of chattel slavery in Europe’s American colonies. Even Europeans were sent as indentured servants, a somewhat milder form of chattel slavery in that they were in bondage to their masters for a limited time.
Eventually, however, American capitalism discovered a means by which it would be possible to permanently stigmatize a sector of its wage slaves as possessing labor power that was not worth as much as that of most other workers. Unlike European immigrants, the skin color of African Americans made it possible to single them out—no matter where they were born or what their abilities might be—to serve as a hereditary caste of the working class, excluded from higher-paid jobs. And even when exceptions were made, their skin color condemned them to work for less than the average wage.
And nothing would have changed for African Americans were it not for their own irrepressible struggle against racial, social and economic injustice. Even now, however, African Americans having fought and won some improvement in their condition are still far from achieving equal rights, equal wages, equal justice in the eyes of the courts, and equal opportunity.

What we see in France and Europe today shows that Europe’s capitalists have learned the lessons of American history and have been busily putting what they’ve learned into effect. But so did the vanguard of the working class also learn these lessons with the help of Karl Marx who issued this warning: “Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself while labor with a black skin is branded.”
The phenomenon of stigmatizing workers by the color of their skin has today become a key problem for the working class in Europe as it has been in the United States for hundreds of years. Almost everywhere, it has become the most dangerous weapon in the hands of the world’s ruling classes. And it is a deadly threat that can only be combated by the working class making the defense of the interests of non-white and other branded segments of the working class and its natural allies, its first responsibility.

However, the world capitalist economy has certainly seen the end of an exceptionally prolonged period of expansion in the production of goods, and the vast expansion of trade into every nook and cranny of the globe.

History shows that when capitalism enters a period of economic stagnation, the economy slows, unemployment grows, and capitalists desperately seek to save themselves by cutting wages, public and private social benefits and intensifying the pace of work. But lowering wages can only be done to a point beyond which capitalism is sure to meet with determined and increasingly militant resistance.

History also shows that in those cases where the trade unions had been ineffective, workers in such trying conditions are compelled to fight back by ousting and replacing ineffective leaders. And when the workers movement is on the ascendancy, it is able to wrest modest improvements in wages, hours and working conditions. And in those cases where the crisis runs long and deep, the struggle between capital and labor can assume explosive and even revolutionary proportions. Thus at different times and places the class struggle rises in intensity to the point where the conquest of state power is within reach and is attainable.
Karl Marx, in an address he made in June 1865 to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) ended his talk with this profound observation:
Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

The point Marx makes lies at the heart of the mistakes made by the workers’ parties of Italy and Germany in the period after the end of the First World War. A period of rising class struggle engulfed Europe, which had been economically weakened by the costs of those four years in which a major portion of Europe’s productive forces had been engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction. And once war production came to an abrupt end and millions of workers suddenly found themselves without jobs, capitalist Europe faced intermittent pre-revolutionary and revolutionary struggles until military production on a massive scale was resumed with the beginning of World War II.

Italy and Germany in Western Europe, and Russia in Eastern Europe, were the first to enter a period of deep social, economic and political crisis as the war came to a close. The class struggle sharpened in all three countries. The Russian workers succeeded in the construction of a mass revolutionary workers party. One that understood Marx’s warning that a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system must be combined with a struggle to abolish the system itself. The Russian workers proceeded to carry through two revolutions, democratic and socialist, with one blow, and laid the foundations for the transition from semi-feudalism toward a world socialist order.
In Italy and Germany, however, the workers seemed to be engaged in an endless series of strikes in which power lay in the streets, but leaders of the workers’ parties failed to follow Marx’s advice and use “their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class.”

Thus, the failure to combine the day-to-day workers’ struggle against the encroachment by capitalism on the living standards gave capitalism and its fascist hirelings the opportunity to mount a mortal attack on the defensive organizations of the Italian workers in 1922 and the German workers in 1933.


Fascism, racism and Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen has justly earned his rabidly nationalist and racist reputation. It is based on his notoriously bigoted declarations blaming immigrant workers for the unusually high rate of unemployment in France and in all other of the world’s capitalist countries. But while one of the characteristic features of fascism is its rabid nationalism as it was expressed in Mussolini’s Italy or its racist targeting of the Jews as it was expressed in Hitler’s Germany, all nationalists and racists are not necessarily fascists.
Another feature of a fascist movement is its middle class social composition. Le Pen’s appeal is directed toward the petty bourgeoisie—that social class encompassing petty proprietors, farmers and salaried employees. But middle class movements have many manifestations. The Greens, for instance, are also a movement based on an appeal to the highly contradictory political instincts of the middle class.

Thus, it can also be said that all nationalist and racist middle class movements are not necessarily fascist.

However, what really sets fascism apart from other middle class political phenomena is its orientation toward extralegal physical assaults on the mass organizations of the working class and upon scapegoated sectors of the population. But that is not a feature of Le Pen’s movement—at least not today, while the French economy is still relatively stable and the great majority of the working and middle classes are still enjoying relative prosperity.
But a mass movement based on a ruined and desperate middle class—the natural constituency of fascist gangs—oriented to the destruction of the defensive economic and political organizations of the working class cannot be sucked out of anyone’s thumb.
One of the many paradoxes of life is that the objective preconditions for the rise of a mass revolutionary working class movement are also the preconditions for the rise of a mass counter-revolutionary fascist movement. But history proves that the petty capitalists and farmers see the big corporations and banks that encroach on their small businesses and small family farms as their enemy—not the working class. Consequently when the middle classes feel that their economic interests are seriously threatened they tend to first turn to the workers and their fighting organizations to help defend them against their oppressors.

Thus, they tend to first welcome and support the rising working class struggles against the class enemy of both workers and middle classes. But if such struggles go on for years with no end in sight, middle class thinking begins to change. Fascism feeds on the growing disappointment by the middle class with the failure of the endless strikes and the street battles between workers and the legal and extralegal repressive instruments of big capital to make a decisive change in their condition.
Leon Trotsky summed it up well in his pamphlet, Fascism, What it is and How to Fight it::
Naturally, the petty proprietor prefers order so long as business is going well and so long as he hopes that tomorrow it will go better. But when this hope is lost, he is easily enraged and is ready to give himself over to the most extreme measures. Otherwise, how could he have overthrown the democratic state and brought fascism to power in Italy and Germany? The despairing petty bourgeois sees in fascism, above all, a fighting force against big capital, and believes that, unlike the [reformist] working class parties which deal only in words, fascism will use force to establish more "justice." The peasant and the artisan are in their manner realists. They understand that one cannot forego the use of force....

The right and wrong way to fight capitalism

While we celebrate the electoral gains made by the two French Trotskyist parties, Workers Struggle (LO) and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), we received the following report issued by the LCR:
The Central Committee [CC] of the LCR met on Sunday, April 28 to discuss the political situation that has come about because of the first round of the Presidential elections, the anti-fascist demonstrations and the preparations for a united demonstration on May 1 that will allow a link between the necessary anti-fascist struggle and the urgency of the demands of labor.
The League CC confirms the positions adopted by the LCR since the evening of April 21 and in this framework reaffirms the need to block the way for the extreme right in the streets as in the voting booth. This means voting against Le Pen on Sunday, May 5, and starting Monday May 6, preparing the conditions for an "All together!" [campaign] against the politics of Chirac. [Emphasis added.]

This has been interpreted, correctly, we believe, by observers to mean that the LCR calls for a vote for Chirac, still the incumbent capitalist president at the time of the League’s announcement, as necessary to stop the “fascist” Le Pen from being elected president of France. Even if “fascism” were indeed the nature of this movement—and a case has not been produced to that effect beyond that Le Pen loudly advocates his abhorrent racist and rabid nationalist views—the way to stop fascism is not by voting for the main political representative of French capitalism.
A fascist threat can only be combated by counter-mobilizations in the streets.
On the other hand, Arlette Laguiller, the presidential candidate of the other, larger, French Trotskyist party, had announced her refusal to give an iota of political support to Chirac or any other capitalist candidate, in line with the revolutionary working class principle of class independence,.
The LCR’s decision to give support to the main capitalist party today, however, is only the latest in a long series of tactical and principled political errors. But this latest violation of principle by the LCR, if not corrected in time, leads to an unambiguous crossing of the Rubicon, from a centrist party—vacillating between revolutionary socialist politics and the politics of class collaboration—to a party limited only to capitalist reform, such as what the Socialist and Communist Parties of France had long ago become.

The LCR’s support to one capitalist party in order to stop another “worse” representative of the capitalist class is a tragic, and for the LCR, a foolish mistake. The LCR’s claim to Trotskyism, that is, revolutionary Marxist politics, means that they should know full well what it means. It is an act that indicates their loss of confidence in the working class and their adaptation to so-called “public opinion,” which is nothing other than the ideas disseminated in the media monopoly owned and controlled by the capitalist class. One of the main themes of this bourgeois public opinion is to insist that Chirac and other candidates of capitalist parties seek to represent “all the people.” And that the choice voters have in elections is between good and bad politicians.

Or as the reformists and labor bureaucrates say in every election here in the United States: we must vote for the “lesser evil,” that is, the better of the two capitalist parties. (By the way, Jacques Chirac was reelected in the May 6 runoff election by an 82 percent majority.)

We stand proudly in solidarity with the Worker’s Struggle party in France and their presidential candidate, Arlette Laguiller. Standing firmly on the revolutionary Marxist principle of class independence is crucial to the defeat of both greater and lesser capitalist evils at every stage in the historic struggle to liberate humanity from capitalist barbarism.

Leader of the French OCI acknowledges past relations with Prime Minister Jospin

Leader of the French OCI acknowledges past relations with Prime Minister Jospin


By Peter Schwarz 13 November 2001



Pierre Lambert, the long-standing leader of the French International Communist Organisation (OCI), has for the first time publicly acknowledged that France’s premier, Lionel Jospin, was once a member of his party.
On October 4, L’Express magazine published an interview with Lambert in which he admitted that he had had “political relations with Jospin” and that Jospin “was a Trotskyist”. Lambert did not specify how long this relationship had lasted, but his statements imply that it had only come to an end in 1986 or 1988.

Questioned as to whether the entry of a number of prominent OCI members into the Socialist Party (SP) in 1986 had led to his political break with Jospin, Lambert replied evasively, “Jospin left after a debate. It was his choice. I intend to comment on this period at a late date.” Lambert’s subsequent denunciation of Jospin’s performance in his role as Minister of Education from 1988 indirectly confirmed the interviewer’s observation that Lambert had only become Jospin’s political adversary that year.

According to Lambert, the French prime minister had spent over 20 years in the OCI and had worked for more than 15 years as an OCI member inside the Socialist Party—13 years as part of its national leadership and five as general secretary. As revealed this summer in an interview with Boris Fraenkel, his political advisor at the time, Jospin joined the OCI in 1964 and entered the Socialist Party shortly after its foundation in 1971.
In another interview with the news radio station LCI on November 5, Lambert said that Jospin had joined François Mitterrand’s organisation with his help “around 1971 and 1972-as did others, too ... He went into the Socialist Party with my consent. He was a member like any other and had a particular job to do.”

Lambert denied that Jospin was a “mole”: “I don’t think that Jospin was a mole in the Socialist Party; he joined because of a particular brand of politics espoused by François Mitterrand: the break with capitalism. Then they (the Socialist Party) did something else. That’s their problem, not mine.”
Lambert’s comments confirm the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site in an earlier article about Jospin’s past: that in 1971 the OCI was following a political line “that no longer had anything in common with the ideas of Leon Trotsky and was able to accommodate the aims of François Mitterrand without any difficulty”.

Lambert, now 81-years old, has long been considered the mentor of people who later made a career in the Socialist Party. The OCI spawned many of Jospin’s closest collaborators, including Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the party’s second most important man. Lambert also enjoys close personal relations with leading figures from Force Ouvriere, the right-wing trade union split-off that emerged from the Stalinist dominated CGT, for which he works as a full-time official.
Moreover, he met regularly with government representatives in his capacity as trade union official, as he admits in the interview with L’Express: “As a responsible trade union official, I used to meet government ministers. It also happened that I participated in negotiations on behalf of my trade union in the Elysée (the headquarters of the French president)”. Despite rumours to the contrary, he denies ever having met Jacques Chirac, the current president.
However, Lambert always keeps in the background of public events—an exception occurring in 1988, when he ran as candidate for the presidential office under his real name, Pierre Boussel. The interview with L’Express is only the second he has ever given to a mainstream newspaper. Recently he announced the publication of a book, planned for the spring of 2002, in which he intends to comment on the various periods of his life. The book will appear directly before the presidential election and—as Lambert at least hints—will contain further revelations about Jospin, who will most likely challenge the incumbent Chirac.

Lambert, a son of Russian immigrants, was born in Paris in 1920. At the age of 14, he joined the communist youth organisation, from which he was soon to be expelled. He entered the Trotskyist movement four years later. In 1952 he took over the leadership of the Communist Internationalist Party (CIP), known as the OCI from 1968 to 1981.
Towards the end of the 1960s, the OCI turned away from the perspective of the Trotskyist movement and in 1971 formally broke with the International Committee of the Fourth International, to which it had belonged until then. It became an important political platform of support for Mitterrand, who was advocating the “unity of the left”—an alliance of the Communist and the Socialist Parties—and who finally won the presidential election in 1981.
The OCI only relinquished its support for Mitterrand at the end of the 1980s, when he fell into widespread disrepute owing to his right-wing politics. Then it founded the Parti des Travailleurs (PT-Workers Party), a collecting bowl for discontented bureaucrats who for one reason or another had failed to make a career in the Socialist Party or the trade unions.

Although the OCI dissociated itself from a revolutionary perspective long ago, it is certainly noteworthy that a man, who worked for an organisation claiming to be Trotskyist for a great part of his life, now stands at the head of the French government and could possibly assume the post of head of state from 2002. Jospin’s experience in left-wing politics is required in order to keep increasing social and political tensions under control and to help dispel any threat to the ruling class.

Other leading representatives of the French establishment have also come forward to confess that they were former Trotskyists. Edwy Plenel, chief editor of Le Monde, published a biography titled Secrets of Youth, in which he writes passionately about his “Trotskyist” past: “Trotskyism as an experience and a heritage will always remain part of my identity; not as a programme or a project, but rather as a state of mind, as a conscious method of criticism in relation to changing perspectives and mental focusing, in relation to political defeats and loyalties.”

Plenel was not a member of the OCI, but of the Pabloite League of Revolutionary Communists that had already abandoned the perspective of the Fourth International in 1953. His allegiance to the French state is indisputable, as is Jospin’s. Le Monde is a flagship of the French bourgeois press and was one of the most important supporters of Mitterrand during the 1980s. That its editor-in-chief now puts himself forward as a Trotskyist is an expression of the attempt to garner support from left-wing circles for the crisis-ridden French establishment.

Lionel Jospin and Trotskyism: the debate over the French prime minister’s past

Lionel Jospin and Trotskyism: the debate over the French prime minister’s past


By Peter Schwarz

27 June 2001



For three weeks, the French press has been full of revelations about the alleged Trotskyist past of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
It started when an interview was published in Paris’s Aujourd’hui with Patrick Dierich, a former member of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI, International Communist Organisation). The 56-year old astronomer, who was an OCI member from 1968 to 1986, told the paper that he knew Jospin in 1971 as a member of the party: “There’s no mistake. It was during the summer of 1971. I was in the same party branch as him. He was Comrade ‘Michel’, and I was Comrade ‘Blum’. We all used pseudonyms.”
Dierich’s claims are not new. Similar rumours have circulated since 1995, without there being any concrete proof up to now. Jospin always rejected these allegations, saying he was being mistaken for his brother Olivier, who had been a prominent member of the OCI into the 1980s.
The revelations made by Dierich were followed by an interview with another former OCI member, the now eighty-year-old Boris Fraenkel, which was published on the web site of the weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur. Fraenkel comes from a German Jewish family and was born in Danzig, in what was then East Prussia. He fled the Nazis to Switzerland, settling in France after the war, where he was a founding member of the Trotskyist OCI.
Fraenkel reported that he got to know Jospin in 1964 and taught him politics in his apartment for over a year. “Lionel Jospin came to see me regularly, to take part in a revolutionary studies group. This was the necessary training before joining the Trotskyist movement. As my comrades liked to say, my speciality was finding young left-wingers and catching them in my net. At that time, Jospin was studying at the École Nationale D’administration [ENA, the university for the French political elite]. I trained him in secret. A future top state official wouldn’t want to be known as a revolutionary. Through our discussions we became friends.”
As proof of his friendship with Jospin, Fraenkel tendered a postcard signed “Lionel”, which the latter had sent him at that time while on vacation. In 1966, Fraenkel reported, he was expelled from the OCI and lost contact with Jospin. He presumes that the leader of the OCI, Pierre Lambert, continued to keep in contact with Jospin, but he cannot say for sure. Fraenkel was expelled from the OCI for championing the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilisation he translated into French.
When asked about these recently published claims during parliamentary questions in the National Assembly, Jospin admitted for the first time that he actually had been connected with the Trotskyist movement. “It is true that in the 1960s I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas, and I established relations with one of the groups of this political movement,” he said. “It was a personal, intellectual and political journey over which, if I may use the word, I have no reason to become redfaced.”
Jospin said he had “made the acquaintance of some remarkable people through these contacts” and this had contributed to his development. He had “nothing to regret and nothing to apologise for”.
He had stressed on previous occasions that he was “a child of Suez and Budapest”. This is an allusion to the invasion of Egypt by British and French troops (social democrat Guy Mollet was then premier of France) and the defeat of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops in 1956. Jospin was nineteen at the time.
One day later, Jospin went into more detail about his contacts with the OCI in an interview that was specially arranged with Radio Europe 1. He said he had come to know a “number of strong personalities there, combative workers, autodidacts, sometimes intellectuals”. This was a “useful counterpoint—I could say, almost an antidote—to my outstanding education at the ENA”. He made “experiences with radicalism” and acquired the ability to understand it “better than many others”.
The newspaper Le Monde has also published a long article about “Lionel Jospin’s Trotskyist past”. The paper claims that in June 1971, Jospin joined the Socialist Party (PS) as a “mole”, i.e., as a secret member of the OCI. Le Monde cites some ten witnesses who claim to have worked with Jospin from the summer of 1969 to the autumn of 1971 in an OCI local branch. Apart from Patrick Dierich and a certain Yvan Berrebi, the paper does not name any of these other witnesses.
Le Monde further maintains that Jospin was in close contact with the OCI throughout the 1970s and only broke off relations with OCI leader Pierre Lambert in 1987, six years after Jospin was elected first secretary of the Socialist Party. This is based on the assertions of two more anonymous witnesses, who claim to have worked as full-time party workers for the OCI in the 1970s. According to them, inside the OCI’s Paris offices Lambert made no secret of his relations with Jospin. In April 1980 he boasted that he had helped Jospin prepare a television debate with Communist Party (CPF) leader Georges Marchais.
Attempts by Le Monde to find out more details from former leading members of the OCI failed. Pierre Lambert, now 84, has refused to make any statement. Daniel Gluckstein, national secretary of the Parti des Travailleurs (PT, Workers Party), the successor organisation to the OCI, said he was only prepared to speak about the Jospin of today: “The rest does not concern us. Jospin’s past is his own problem, not ours.” The historian Pierre Broué said he knew nothing. Charles Berg, secretary of the OCI’s youth movement AJS at the beginning of the 1970s, and according to Le Monde responsible for the OCI’s entryist work in the Socialist Party, refused to make any public statement.
However Berg, who was expelled from the OCI in 1979 and today works as a television producer under the name Jacques Kirsner, had already acknowledged in a 1999 article for Libération that the OCI enjoyed relations with Jospin: “For many years, we fought politically alongside Lionel Jospin and shared the same revolutionary, socialist and democratic convictions.”
Asked on Radio Europe 1 about the claims made in Le Monde, Jospin did not deny that there had been meetings and discussions. They were, however, of a “private character” and had not touched his “public and open work in the Socialist Party.”
Questioned whether he had joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1971 as a “mole” of the OCI, and when exactly he had ended his political and intellectual relations with the OCI, Jospin responded by saying he had joined the PS freely and had always acted freely in the Socialist Party. “Ever since I bore any responsibilities in the Socialist Party—that is, since 1973—I acted fully as a member of the Socialists. Everything else was based on contacts and discussions, which I might have perhaps had, but which were purely private and in no way public. Look at what I did between 1973 and 1981, and afterwards, as education minister and in other functions, and see if there was the slightest problem with that!”
Public reactions to Jospin’s confession were rather restrained. From his own camp, he received almost unanimous support. Some representatives of the opposition tried to utilise the affair politically, and reports emerged that in President Jacques Chirac’s office the history of the Trotskyist movement is being scrutinised for ammunition in the upcoming presidential election campaign. Jospin will probably be the Socialist Party candidate in 2002 against the Gaullist incumbent Chirac.
Jospin is not so much attacked for his contacts with the OCI as for having kept them secret so long. Contacts with radical groups in one’s youth are not unusual in France, where the radicalisation of the 1960s involved broad layers. Even the Gaullist Chirac has admitted publicly that he sold the Stalinist newspaper l’Humanité in his youth.
Jospin’s closest circle includes numerous functionaries who still belonged to radical organisations in the 1980s. For example, Jean Christophe Cambadélis, a parliamentary deputy for Paris and one of Jospin’s most important supporters inside the Socialist Party, was a member of the OCI central committee until 1986.
The OCI, Mitterrand and the “Union of the Left” (Union de la Gauche)
Jospin’s latest admissions about his radical past may have been made primarily for tactical reasons. By making them public now, he may be hoping to prevent his adversaries from using such revelations as ammunition in next year’s election campaign. But beyond such passing political considerations, Jospin’s connections with the OCI raise more fundamental questions. How is it that a man, who showed sympathies for Trotskyist ideas and possibly belonged to a section of the Fourth International at the age of 30, stands at the head of the French government 25 years later as a trusted representative of the bourgeoisie?
One can only speculate about Jospin’s personal motivations. Only he could provide information about the extent to which he actually supported Trotskyist ideals in his youth—something he obviously does not intend to do. There is, however, an obvious connection between Jospin’s career and the development of the OCI itself, which rapidly turned away from Trotskyist principles at the end of the 1960s, when Jospin was in close contact with the organisation. In 1971, the year Jospin joined the Socialist Party, the OCI broke organisationally with the International Committee the Fourth International, to which it had belonged up to then as the French section.
In 1971, the OCI pursued a political line that no longer had anything in common with Trotsky’s conceptions, but could easily be accommodated to the aims of Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand. It is indicative that both Patrick Dierich and Jospin himself assume Mitterrand was informed about Jospin’s contacts with the OCI and did not have any objections.
According to Dierich, Mitterrand “knew all about his [Jospin’s] dual membership. Don’t forget, he was a former interior minister! ... At that time, we were not of the opinion that the Communist Party stood closer to the workers than the Socialist Party. Moreover, from an electoral point of view, only a PS candidate could beat the right wing. Therefore, one had to help Mitterrand. Jospin did that in his own way. Objectively, the OCI was an ally of the Socialists.”
Mitterrand quickly favoured Jospin and by 1973 had already brought him into the national secretariat of the party. Jospin acknowledged on Radio Europe 1 that his contact with the OCI did not pose any obstacle. Asked whether Mitterrand knew anything, he answered: “In my opinion, somebody must have whispered in his ear about it, but we certainly never spoke about it. I believe he was pleased by what I did.”
In June 1971, at the congress of Épinay, Mitterrand took over the leadership of the Socialist Party in a carefully prepared surprise move. In contrast to the old leadership under Guy Mollet, which had been in office since end of the war and was completely tied to the conceptions of the Cold War, Mitterrand advocated the unity of the left, “ l’union de la Gauche”. By this he understood both a widening of the Socialist Party—at that time limping far behind the Communist Party with the voters—through the integration of republican and splintered socialist currents, and an alliance with the Communist Party, in which the Socialists would play the leading role.
In pursuing this course, Mitterrand was in no sense acting as a left-winger or committed socialist. An official under the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and a bourgeois minister in the Fourth Republic, he was a man of great political ambition but without great political convictions. This made him all the more adroit in exploiting the convictions of others—a sort of modern-day Joseph Fouché*. Already in 1965 he had stood against General de Gaulle as the common candidate of the left and achieved a considerable result—only to be politically marginalised again soon after.
The student revolt and the general strike of May-June 1968 gave new impetus to Mitterrand’s efforts to form a “Union of the Left”. The Fifth Republic was shaken to its foundations. President de Gaulle had temporarily lost control of the situation and was only able to maintain office with the aid of the Communist Party. The end of his rule seemed imminent.
The crisis of the regime was a consequence of social changes that had occurred. In the fifties and sixties, France underwent a remarkable economic boom that radically altered the balance between agriculture and industry, reducing the significance of the rural petty bourgeoisie who had long served as a conservative force in French politics. A young, militant working class had grown up in the suburbs of its cities. Owing to the damaged reputation of the Stalinists and the fragmentation of the Socialists, the militancy of these layers threatened to take a revolutionary course.
Under these conditions, the Union of the Left served to contain the movement by channelling it into calmer waters. Although Mitterrand’s past had bequeathed him a tarnished reputation, he was successful—with the help of the Union of the Left—in capturing the imagination of broad layers of workers. Enormous hopes and illusions were fostered in the Union of the Left during the seventies. When Mitterrand was finally elected president in 1981, hundreds of thousands danced in the streets—though not for long. Mitterrand was soon to thwart the hopes they had invested in him.
In 1971 the OCI played a decisive role in propping up the hopes and illusions roused by Mitterrand. It provided him with valuable and welcome support from the left.
Following de Gaulle’s resignation in April 1969, the OCI had elevated the demand for a common presidential candidate supported by the Socialist and Communist parties to the axis of its political strategy. It designated this policy a “united workers’ front”, expressly emphasising that it was not merely a tactical demand, but a central strategy. The OCI claimed that this strategy arose from the necessity to counterpose the working class, as an independent class, to the bourgeoisie, its state and its government. “The answer to the question of government power resolves itself into the question of the united workers’ front,” stated the OCI’s newspaper, La Vérité (No. 544, p. 10). “It is indispensable for the solution of the question of power and the state,” the article continued.
The claim that the election of a candidate supported by both Socialists and Stalinists would amount to bringing the working class to power was nonsensical. For decades both parties had demonstrated their loyalty to the bourgeois state. But as a left fig leaf for Mitterrand’s politics, the demand proved effective. When the left failed to produce a common candidate in 1969, the OCI denounced the PS and CPF for “destroying the class front of the proletariat”. Michel Rocard’s United Socialist Party (PSU) and Alain Krivine’s Communist League, which had stood their own candidates, were also condemned by the OCI for “splitting the class front”.
Mitterrand obviously appreciated support from this side. The OCI was not only promoting his ends; it could also supply him with useful political forces. Gérard Leclerc and Florence Muracciole, biographers of Jospin, describe the OCI of those days (then under the name, International Communist Party, PCI) as follows: “Given impetus by the events of May 1968, the PCI was in an upswing at the beginning of the seventies. It had almost 8,000 members and could mobilise tens of thousands more—above all, thanks to its youth organisation, the Alliance of Youth for Socialism (AJS)... It controlled the UNEF-ID, the most important student organisation, and was well established in numerous branches of the Force Ouvrière trade union... It was also very active in the teachers’ trade union and even—although very discreetly—in the CGT [the Communist Party-controlled trade union]”. (Lionel Jospin, L’héritier Rebelle”, pp. 43-44)
In 1971 Mitterrand even appeared as principal speaker at a ceremony organised and stewarded by the OCI to mark the centenary of the Paris Commune.
The OCI and the Fourth International
When Jospin came into contact with the OCI in 1964, it was the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI had been founded in 1953 to defend orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloism, an opportunistic tendency lead by Michael Pablo and later by Ernest Mandel. The OCI’s break from the ICFI and its support for Mitterrand severed the French working class from the programme of the Fourth International and thereby deprived it of any revolutionary alternative. This is one of the most important causes of the current crisis of the labour movement, which has proven unable to defend its social and political achievements despite repeated militant struggles. To understand this issue, a short digression into the history of the Fourth International is necessary.
The struggle against Pabloism revolved around the fundamental orientation of the programme of the Trotskyist movement.
When Leon Trotsky took the initiative of founding the Fourth International in the 1930s, he was drawing the consequences of the fact that both the Second (social democratic) and Third (communist) Internationals had hopelessly degenerated and had exhausted their potential as instruments for social progress. Social democracy had proved itself to be the loyal accomplice of the bourgeoisie ever since the first world war. The Communist International had been transformed into a tool of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, and was responsible for catastrophic defeats of the international labour movement. Particularly as a result of the defeat of the German proletariat—paralysed in the face of Hitler’s takeover due to the disastrous policies of the German Communist Party (KPD)—Trotsky drew the conclusion that the Communist International was no longer of any use in the struggle for socialist revolution.
Henceforth, the crisis of leadership in the working class could be resolved only through the construction of new proletarian parties as sections of the Fourth International. “The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the bureaucracies of the Second and Third, Amsterdam and Anarcho-syndicalist Internationals as on their centrist satellites...These organisations are not pledges of the future, but decayed survivals of the past,” declared the founding programme of the Fourth International, published in 1938.
Pabloism repudiated this perspective. Impressed by the scale of nationalisations implemented by the Stalinist bureaucracy in countries occupied by the Red Army after the Second World War, Pablo proclaimed that the Stalinist bureaucracy—under the pressure of objective events—was capable of reforming itself. The evolution towards socialism, for centuries, would take the form of “deformed workers’ states” like those formed in Eastern Europe at the time. Accordingly, the task of the Fourth International no longer consisted in fighting the Stalinist parties, but of influencing them, of recognising progressive tendencies within their ranks or dissolving itself into the Stalinist parties completely.
Pabloism was later to apply this perspective to a variety of petit-bourgeois movements—Mao’s peasant army, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas, diverse national liberation movements and student movements of the 1960s. The tenor of the perspective was always the same: it was not the working class under its own, independent banner that was the bearer of the socialist revolution, but rather other social forces that would move to the left under the pressure of objective events.
The French Trotskyists split over this question. In 1952, the Pabloite minority expelled the orthodox Trotskyist majority with the backing of the International Secretariat controlled by Pablo. The majority, later to become the OCI, affiliated itself with the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1953. The minority remained with the revisionist International (later, the United) Secretariat. The Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), today led by Alan Krivine, developed out of this Pabloite minority. There was also a third tendency in France that claimed to be Trotskyist but had refused to join the Fourth International in 1938—today’s Lutte Ouvrière (LO-Workers’ Struggle) led by Arlette Laguiller. This party was strongly oriented toward syndicalism and viewed the international conflict over program and principles with contempt.
In the mid-1960s, the OCI placed a question mark over the International Committee’s fight against Pabloism. Initially, this manifested itself in its claim that the Fourth International had become moribund: that it had been destroyed by Pabloism and had to be rebuilt.
The Socialist Labour League (SLL), the British section of the International Committee, vehemently opposed this contention. In 1967 it wrote to the OCI: “The future of the Fourth International is represented in the stored-up hatred and experience of millions of workers for the Stalinists and reformists who betray their struggles. The Fourth International must consciously fight for leadership to meet this need.... Only this struggle against revisionism can prepare the cadres to take the leadership of the millions of workers drawn into the struggle against capitalism and against the bureaucracy... the living struggle against Pabloism and the training of cadres and parties on the basis of this struggle was the life of the Fourth International in the years since 1952.” (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol. 5, London 1975, pp. 107-114)
On the eve of the great class struggles of 1968, the SLL also warned about the consequences of the OCI’s sceptical standpoint: “Now the radicalisation of workers in western Europe is proceeding rapidly, particularly in France... There is always a danger at such a stage of development that a revolutionary party responds to the situation in the working class not in a revolutionary way, but by an adaptation to the level of struggle to which the workers are restricted by their own experience under the old leadership—i.e., to the inevitable initial confusion. Such revisions of the fight for the independent party and the Transitional Programme are usually dressed up in the disguise of getting closer to the working class, unity of all those in struggle, not posing ultimatums, abandoning dogmatism, etc.” (ibid., pp. 113-114)
This warning went unheard. The revolts of 1968 propelled thousands of new, inexperienced members into the ranks of the OCI and its youth organisation (AJS), and the OCI leadership adapted itself to their state of confusion. The demand for a “united class front”—also criticised by the SLL in 1967—now became a formula with which the OCI adapted itself to the social democratic bureaucracy and led the newly won forces back to the old bureaucratic apparatuses.
There was no longer any fundamental difference between the views of the OCI and those of the Pabloites. The only difference was that the OCI oriented itself towards social democracy—its enmity toward Stalinism increasingly adapting itself to the anti-communism of social democracy—while the Pabloites maintained their orientation towards the Stalinist parties.
In the seventies, the OCI developed into an important reservoir for youthful recruits to the social democratic bureaucracy. Lionel Jospin is only one of many functionaries who went through the OCI school. According to Henri Weber, who made his way from the Pabloite youth movement LCR to the right wing of the Socialist Party, there are “hundreds of old Trotskyists in the Socialist Party. This is a classical career. You could make a club out of them.” Making an amalgam between orthodox Trotskyists and pseudo-Trotskyists of the Pabloite and OCI variety, he went on the say that Trotskyism was an “excellent school for education”.
Marisol Touraine, a supporter of Jospin, commented on the claim that Jospin went into the Socialist Party as an agent of the OCI with the words: “What is the point of entryism, when in the end everyone ends up a social democrat?”
The OCI also spread its influence through the trade union bureaucracy. In particular, it had close connections with the leadership of Force Ouvrière (FO), the right-wing splitoff that emerged from the Stalinist-dominated CGT. Numerous members of the leadership of the OCI held full-time offices in the apparatus of the FO. Pierre Lambert, the OCI leader, was for a long time a close advisor of André Bergeron, the FO chairman, and Marc Blondel, Bergeron’s successor, is reputed to have owed his post to the support of the OCI.
At the end of the 1980s, the OCI severed itself from the Socialist Party to some extent and cropped up again under the name Parti des Travailleurs (PT-Workers’ Party). But this did not constitute a return to an orthodox Trotskyist line. The PT is a gathering point for right-wing social democratic bureaucrats who have fallen out with the Socialist Party for one reason or another or have failed to obtain coveted posts.
The consequences of the OCI’s politics have been devastating for the working class. During Mitterrand’s fourteen years in power, at first within the Union of the Left and then in cohabitation with the right, the social gains of the working class were systematically dismantled, under conditions in which the workers lacked a political alternative. In the end Mitterrand paved the way for the return to power of the Gaullists.
In the wake of the mass strike movement in the autumn of 1996, Jospin was, to the surprise of the French political establishment and the media, elected prime minister in 1997. But despite occasional left-wing rhetoric, his economic and social policies have basically mirrored those of his conservative predecessor.
Since coming to power Jospin’s “government of the left majority” has largely exhausted the trust invested in it. The Communist Party, in particular, is on the wane. This party, which in its heyday won over 20 percent of the vote, now fluctuates between seven and eight percent and has been overtaken by the Greens.
The current debate about Trotskyism in the French press—accompanied by numerous articles concerning the history of Trotskyism—is intimately bound up with current French politics. In view of the crisis of the Jospin government, the bourgeoisie is on the lookout for new support from the left and is hoping to find it in the “Trotskyists” of Krivine’s LCR and Laguiller’s Lutte Ouvrière. Based on its experience with the OCI, it will hardly be disappointed with the original Pabloite organisation, which by 1953 had already broken with the perspective of the Fourth International. While Lutte Ouvrière clings closely to the trade unions, the LCR is eagerly awaiting an offer for collaboration from the Communist Party.
Neither party has a perspective to offer the working class. For such a perspective, it will be necessary to construct a section of the world party the OCI turned its back on in 1971: the International Committee of the Fourth International.
* Joseph Fouché—a Jacobin and advocate of the harshest measures during the Terror against the old aristocracy and royalists, later chief organizer of the right-wing coup of Thermidor which overthrew the Jacobin dictatorship, he became chief of the national police under the bourgeois Directory (1794-1799), and went on to serve Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial regime in a similar capacity. Fouché became a synonym for the ultimate political survivor, one who combines ruthlessness, unscrupulousness and complete lack of principle.