The latest issue of Workers' Liberty features an essay by David Broder on the May-June 1968 General Strike in France, with particular reference to the self-activity of the working class against the will of the union leaders and attempts to implement forms of workers' control and management.
It is followed by an account of the first night of the first factory occupation, which took place at Sud Aviation near Nantes.
Click here to read the pdf file.
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Trotskyism in occupied France
I have translated the complete surviving collection of Arbeiter und Soldat, the clandestine paper produced by the French Trotskyists (Comités de la IVe Internationale) for Wehrmacht soldiers in 1943-44. It has been published as a supplement to the latest issue of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty paper Solidarity.
Click here to access the files. My introduction appears below.
By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a full occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad, after months of exaggeration of Wehrmacht success in the Nazi media, and the subsequent loss of much of south-western Russia; the incompetence of the Italian army; the Allies’ conquest of North African and threatened landings in southern Italy; Japan’s defeats at the hands of the United States in the Pacific; Tito’s Yugoslav partisan movement which had taken control of much of Macedonia, southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of Slovenia; and the mounting French Resistance, led by Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, were all bad omens for the Nazi leaders and their satraps.
Indeed, with increasing privations, bombings of cities and military disasters, there were significant stirrings of discontent in the Axis powers. Not only did high-up German officers initiate plots to remove Hitler in order to better manage the war effort (the closest-run, and final such attempt to do so was the well-known 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg), but in Rome the Fascist Grand Council actually voted 19-7 on 24 July 1943 to no-confidence Benito Mussolini, who was summoned to the King Victor Emmanuel III, arrested and taken to jail in an ambulance. This manoeuvre on the part of the King and the Marshal Pietro Badoglio was an attempted ‘revolution from above’ mounted to save the ruling class from the threat of working-class uprisings, after the huge strike waves in the industrial north starting in March 1943 including stoppages in major armaments plants in Milan and Turin to secure more evacuation allowances – the first big strikes since 1925. As the Partito Comunista Internazionalista commented in August:
“The bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the Church, who created and supported Fascism, who today are throwing Mussolini to the people to avoid going down with him, and who don democratic and populist clothes in order to continue the exploitation and oppression of the working class, have no right to say anything in today’s crisis. This right exclusively belongs to the working class, the peasants and the soldiers, the eternal victims of the imperialist octopus.”
The late World War II period is usually compared unfavourably to the wave of revolutionary struggles provoked by World War I (the February and October revolutions in the Russian empire; large anti-war demonstrations in Germany; and after the war the Bavarian soviet republic; the Hungarian soviet republic; and a series of revolutionary opportunities in Germany until 1923), contrary to Trotsky’s prediction that it would cause an even greater revolutionary crisis. However, during this period there were signs significant working-class struggles in several belligerent countries, including the efforts of the resurgent Italian workers’ movement; miners’ strikes in Britain and the United States; strikes tens of thousands strong against forced deportations in France and Belgium; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and small-scale mutinies in the German armed forces.
But for the most part working-class mobilisation was co-opted into the Allied war effort. Hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the Communist Parties of Europe, loyal as they were to Stalin’s Soviet Union, courageously devoted themselves to anti-occupation “resistance” armies led by bourgeois nationalists in the belief that it was the best way of fighting fascism. The hollowness of Stalin’s “anti-fascist” credentials was however made clear by his keenness for CPs to work alongside the same nationalists, generals and bankers who had helped the fascists crush the workers’ movements of Europe to start with. For example, he created in Moscow a “Committee for a Free Germany” mostly composed of ex-Nazi generals; along with the other Allies supposedly liberating Europe from fascism he left Franco in power in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; he betrayed his own supporters in Greece, who were then butchered by the monarchists’ allies, the British Army, at the end of that country’s Civil War; and he ordered the Italian CP to support the monarchy and lay down its weapons. Although this was in a sense nothing new – before the war the French CP leader Maurice Thorez had called on “patriotic” French fascists to join a “national front” against the Nazis – Stalin’s leading role in the stabilisation of European capitalism in the 1943-1945 period was a shock to some, with a 2,500-strong Stalinist formation Movimento Comunista d’Italia even breaking from the Italian CP under the impression that they were implementing Stalin’s “real” policies and that the local CP leader Palmiro Togliatti was being disloyal to Moscow!
The Communist Parties and Moscow, who still had enormous prestige among much of the world working class, were hostile to all strikes and any independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort. The British Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt even proclaimed “today it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line”. Despite the USSR’s August 1939-June 1941 pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe, Stalin’s imperialist ambitions were now completely intertwined with the war aims of the Allies – indeed, the “Soviet” empire would be a leading, if not the leading, beneficiary of the Allied victory, extending its grip over almost all of Eastern and Central Europe and seizing tens of billions of pounds worth of war reparations. The nationalist and anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Moscow, which portrayed the war to the Russian people as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be seen as largely responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war with hundreds of thousands of rapes of women and girls, the murder and leaving to starve of millions of civilians as well as organising huge population transfers. In France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone kill a Kraut”, refusing to draw any distinction between Nazi-led German imperialism and the working-class German conscripts in the Wehrmacht.
This monumental error was only replicated in part by the Trotskyist Fourth International, which had no truck whatsoever with the idea that workers in the Allied countries should cross picket lines to aid the USSR’s war effort or that the war was a war between ‘democratic nations’ and ‘fascist nations’. However, the Fourth International press did foster illusions in the progressive character of the USSR’s war effort, claiming that as a “degenerated workers’ state” with a nationalised economy it deserved support against the Axis, and furthermore in some of its sections’ press hailed the progress of “Trotsky’s Red Army” in fighting back the Wehrmacht. American Trotskyist James Cannon said that Trotskyists would “fight in the front rank” of the Soviet army to defend the USSR. Of course, the Fourth International’s enthusiastic claims that the USSR’s successes in the war were the result of continuing “Leninist planning” or Trotsky’s role in establishing the Red Army were nonsensical; the Russian economy had experienced complete counter-revolution, with an atomised working-class unable to act independently with its own unions, soviets or party, never mind plan the economy for itself; the Communist Party had been completely gutted, with almost all the leading actors in the revolution executed by Stalin; the Red Army high command had itself been purged repeatedly, while rank, titles and saluting had been reintroduced as well as orders and military academies named after Tsarist war heroes like Aleksandr Suvorov; early setbacks in the war at the hands of Germany (whose own war economy was almost entirely state-run) ran counter to claims of the superiority of the Russian economy over the capitalist countries; and indeed throughout the war the Russians relied heavily on food supplies and military equipment from the United States, including thousands of Studebaker trucks.
However, despite this misunderstanding of the role of the USSR in the war, the Fourth International and its member organisations did mount a heroic struggle against national chauvinism and illusions in the democratic aspirations of Britain and the United States. French Trotskyists were sharply critical of the Gaullist “French Resistance”, characterising it as an instrument of Allied imperialism and a movement which aspired not simply to liberate France but also to let it hold onto its colonial empire. Rather than calling on the working class to act as a supporting cast for the Allied war effort, these internationalists called for fraternisation between soldiers, working-class struggle against the participating governments and a “revolutionary defeatist” attitude towards both sides, hoping to transform the imperialist war into international class war. As Jean Rous had explained in a motion to the centrist Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan’s congress in 1939:
“The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism. Indeed:
“1. Revolutionary agitation led by workers in our country will exercise a powerful contagious influence on workers in the fascist countries; will provoke the break up of the rival capitalist armies, fraternisation between soldiers of both sides and the collapse of the dictatorships; and will light the flame of world revolution, the only means of defeating war and fascism, across the globe.
“2. Besides, a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class in our country will turn the imperialist war into a civil war and create the conditions for meaningful national defence: only a proletariat in control of its own destiny and defending a socialist order will be able to mount an invincible resistance to foreign fascism…”
It was with this aim of winning over German troops to a common struggle against the belligerent imperialists that in summer 1943 the French Trotskyists turned to organising among the German troops occupying France. Given the strict discipline of the Wehrmacht and the murderous anti-communism of the Gestapo (and their French accomplices, the Milice) this was incredibly dangerous, but important both in terms of teaching the French workers to repudiate the chauvinist attitudes promoted by the Communist Party and in terms of encouraging dissent among the German ranks, as had been manifested earlier in 1943 by a submarine mutiny in Brest, north-western France. The French Comités de la IVe Internationale (Fourth International Committees) produced German-language leaflets for Wehrmacht troops as well as a monthly German-language newspaper, Arbeiter und Soldat (i.e. Worker and Soldier) and built links with German troops.
This was not the only such initiative. The paper of the group associated with Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier, formerly known as la Commune but from September 1943 as le Soviet, had a German-language back page, and the group also had contacts in Germany. But more important for the Fourth International group were the efforts arising from the German troops themselves. German Trotskyist produced a paper Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen (i.e. News for the Worker[s] and Soldier[s] in the West) and furthermore a previously unorganised group of soldiers in Brittany produced Der Arbeiter (i.e. The Worker). The latter journal encouraged dissent amongst the ranks but also called on conscripted workers to “throw down your weapons and go home”, a slogan opposed by the Fourth International Committees, who wanted the workers to hang on to their weapons and carefully organise for an uprising to overthrow the Nazis before the Allied “liberators” plundered Germany. The Fourth International Committees therefore held discussions with revolutionary soldiers and tried to carry out joint agitation.
Yvan Craipeau’s book Contre vents et marées quotes the electrics worker Roland Filiâtre, one of the comrades responsible for this work (under the alias Dupont): “The French comrades started discussions with German soldiers and got them talking and giving hints of their past politics. Once they had shown themselves trustworthy, after screening they were put in touch with the German soldiers who produced Der Arbeiter and then taken care of by their organisation. The Paris region was organised as two branches. But the heart of the organisation was in Brittany, both around Nantes and in particular around Brest where the soldiers provided the party with Ausweis [identity cards] and weapons. In Brest the organisation had about fifty soldiers on average despite some people being posted elsewhere. Contacts were established in Toulon, Valence, La Rochelle and at Conches aerodrome. There was also an organisation in Belgium. Links were established with the German Trotskyist organisation, most importantly in the port of Hamburg, in Lübeck and in Rostock. Victor [a German Trotskyist, whose real name was Widelin] was responsible for these contacts. Arbeiter und Soldat was also distributed in garrisons in Italy.”
These brave efforts brought down harsh repression on the heads of the French Trotskyists, many of whom such as Yvan Craipeau had repeatedly raised the alarm in the group about certain comrades’ lack of care in evading detection. Realising these fears, young Fourth International activists imprudently but enthusiastically joined in a demonstration staged by Der Arbeiter activists through the streets of Kerhoun, singing the Internationale and thus attracted the attention of the fascist police. Not much later, in early October 1943 a meeting of Trotskyist activists and German soldiers held in Brest was found out by the Gestapo, who arrested all the participants. 17 German soldiers as well as Robert Cruau, who organised fraternisation in the region, were executed on 6 October. Once the Gestapo were on the trail, the Trotskyists were doomed. On 7 October 18 Fourth International Committees activists in Brittany were arrested, along with much of the Paris organisation. In total around fifty French activists were rounded up, and many of them were tortured, executed or sent to concentration camps. Similarly, as many as fifty Der Arbeiter soldier comrades were put to death, and their paper never reappeared. Arbeiter und Soldat was itself out of action until May 1944, such were the losses suffered by the Fourth International Committees.
For these courageous activists the class struggle never stopped: even having been arrested and taken to the Compiègne transit camp Marcel Beaufrère told his comrades that: “We are going to be deported to Buchenwald. Before leaving I want to say: we are going to meet up with German revolutionaries and make the revolution with them.” Indeed, the French Trotskyists set up a cell at the Buchenwald concentration camp and in April 1944 it managed to release a manifesto calling for: “revolutionary fraternisation with the workers in the armies of occupation. For a Germany of workers’ councils in a Europe of workers’ councils! For the world workers’ revolution!”. But the sad fact was that many of these activists would soon be murdered by the Nazis. In reality the task with which the Trotskyist movement was confronted, lifting the world working class from the abyss of imperialist war, fascism and Stalinism, was far beyond their extremely modest numbers and means. Not only the crushing of the German workers’ movement by fascism but also Stalinist misleadership and the ensuing co-option of working-class and democratic struggle by the Allied imperialists meant that working-class revolution as had been seen at the end of the war twenty-five years previously was nigh-on impossible. Despite all these difficulties the Trotskyists fought to promote the internationalist Marxist tradition, and here we reproduce the surviving propaganda distributed among German troops occupying France in 1943-44, both the collection of Arbeiter und Soldat and the sole extant fragment of Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen.
Click here to access the files. My introduction appears below.
By summer 1943 the Axis war machine was suffering heavy setbacks. Although Hitler had completed a full occupation of France in November 1942, and still held on to his conquests in the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and parts of western Russia, the Axis powers no longer looked able to win the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad, after months of exaggeration of Wehrmacht success in the Nazi media, and the subsequent loss of much of south-western Russia; the incompetence of the Italian army; the Allies’ conquest of North African and threatened landings in southern Italy; Japan’s defeats at the hands of the United States in the Pacific; Tito’s Yugoslav partisan movement which had taken control of much of Macedonia, southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of Slovenia; and the mounting French Resistance, led by Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, were all bad omens for the Nazi leaders and their satraps.
Indeed, with increasing privations, bombings of cities and military disasters, there were significant stirrings of discontent in the Axis powers. Not only did high-up German officers initiate plots to remove Hitler in order to better manage the war effort (the closest-run, and final such attempt to do so was the well-known 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg), but in Rome the Fascist Grand Council actually voted 19-7 on 24 July 1943 to no-confidence Benito Mussolini, who was summoned to the King Victor Emmanuel III, arrested and taken to jail in an ambulance. This manoeuvre on the part of the King and the Marshal Pietro Badoglio was an attempted ‘revolution from above’ mounted to save the ruling class from the threat of working-class uprisings, after the huge strike waves in the industrial north starting in March 1943 including stoppages in major armaments plants in Milan and Turin to secure more evacuation allowances – the first big strikes since 1925. As the Partito Comunista Internazionalista commented in August:
“The bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the Church, who created and supported Fascism, who today are throwing Mussolini to the people to avoid going down with him, and who don democratic and populist clothes in order to continue the exploitation and oppression of the working class, have no right to say anything in today’s crisis. This right exclusively belongs to the working class, the peasants and the soldiers, the eternal victims of the imperialist octopus.”
The late World War II period is usually compared unfavourably to the wave of revolutionary struggles provoked by World War I (the February and October revolutions in the Russian empire; large anti-war demonstrations in Germany; and after the war the Bavarian soviet republic; the Hungarian soviet republic; and a series of revolutionary opportunities in Germany until 1923), contrary to Trotsky’s prediction that it would cause an even greater revolutionary crisis. However, during this period there were signs significant working-class struggles in several belligerent countries, including the efforts of the resurgent Italian workers’ movement; miners’ strikes in Britain and the United States; strikes tens of thousands strong against forced deportations in France and Belgium; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and small-scale mutinies in the German armed forces.
But for the most part working-class mobilisation was co-opted into the Allied war effort. Hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the Communist Parties of Europe, loyal as they were to Stalin’s Soviet Union, courageously devoted themselves to anti-occupation “resistance” armies led by bourgeois nationalists in the belief that it was the best way of fighting fascism. The hollowness of Stalin’s “anti-fascist” credentials was however made clear by his keenness for CPs to work alongside the same nationalists, generals and bankers who had helped the fascists crush the workers’ movements of Europe to start with. For example, he created in Moscow a “Committee for a Free Germany” mostly composed of ex-Nazi generals; along with the other Allies supposedly liberating Europe from fascism he left Franco in power in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; he betrayed his own supporters in Greece, who were then butchered by the monarchists’ allies, the British Army, at the end of that country’s Civil War; and he ordered the Italian CP to support the monarchy and lay down its weapons. Although this was in a sense nothing new – before the war the French CP leader Maurice Thorez had called on “patriotic” French fascists to join a “national front” against the Nazis – Stalin’s leading role in the stabilisation of European capitalism in the 1943-1945 period was a shock to some, with a 2,500-strong Stalinist formation Movimento Comunista d’Italia even breaking from the Italian CP under the impression that they were implementing Stalin’s “real” policies and that the local CP leader Palmiro Togliatti was being disloyal to Moscow!
The Communist Parties and Moscow, who still had enormous prestige among much of the world working class, were hostile to all strikes and any independent working-class action which might undermine the Allied war effort. The British Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt even proclaimed “today it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line”. Despite the USSR’s August 1939-June 1941 pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe, Stalin’s imperialist ambitions were now completely intertwined with the war aims of the Allies – indeed, the “Soviet” empire would be a leading, if not the leading, beneficiary of the Allied victory, extending its grip over almost all of Eastern and Central Europe and seizing tens of billions of pounds worth of war reparations. The nationalist and anti-German chauvinist hysteria promoted by Moscow, which portrayed the war to the Russian people as just another chapter in the Slavs’ struggle against the Germans, must be seen as largely responsible for the vengeance exacted on the German people at the end of the war with hundreds of thousands of rapes of women and girls, the murder and leaving to starve of millions of civilians as well as organising huge population transfers. In France the Communist Party raised the slogans “everyone, united against the Krauts” and “everyone kill a Kraut”, refusing to draw any distinction between Nazi-led German imperialism and the working-class German conscripts in the Wehrmacht.
This monumental error was only replicated in part by the Trotskyist Fourth International, which had no truck whatsoever with the idea that workers in the Allied countries should cross picket lines to aid the USSR’s war effort or that the war was a war between ‘democratic nations’ and ‘fascist nations’. However, the Fourth International press did foster illusions in the progressive character of the USSR’s war effort, claiming that as a “degenerated workers’ state” with a nationalised economy it deserved support against the Axis, and furthermore in some of its sections’ press hailed the progress of “Trotsky’s Red Army” in fighting back the Wehrmacht. American Trotskyist James Cannon said that Trotskyists would “fight in the front rank” of the Soviet army to defend the USSR. Of course, the Fourth International’s enthusiastic claims that the USSR’s successes in the war were the result of continuing “Leninist planning” or Trotsky’s role in establishing the Red Army were nonsensical; the Russian economy had experienced complete counter-revolution, with an atomised working-class unable to act independently with its own unions, soviets or party, never mind plan the economy for itself; the Communist Party had been completely gutted, with almost all the leading actors in the revolution executed by Stalin; the Red Army high command had itself been purged repeatedly, while rank, titles and saluting had been reintroduced as well as orders and military academies named after Tsarist war heroes like Aleksandr Suvorov; early setbacks in the war at the hands of Germany (whose own war economy was almost entirely state-run) ran counter to claims of the superiority of the Russian economy over the capitalist countries; and indeed throughout the war the Russians relied heavily on food supplies and military equipment from the United States, including thousands of Studebaker trucks.
However, despite this misunderstanding of the role of the USSR in the war, the Fourth International and its member organisations did mount a heroic struggle against national chauvinism and illusions in the democratic aspirations of Britain and the United States. French Trotskyists were sharply critical of the Gaullist “French Resistance”, characterising it as an instrument of Allied imperialism and a movement which aspired not simply to liberate France but also to let it hold onto its colonial empire. Rather than calling on the working class to act as a supporting cast for the Allied war effort, these internationalists called for fraternisation between soldiers, working-class struggle against the participating governments and a “revolutionary defeatist” attitude towards both sides, hoping to transform the imperialist war into international class war. As Jean Rous had explained in a motion to the centrist Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan’s congress in 1939:
“The party will not be put off the belief that the main enemy is in our own country by the possibility that mass revolutionary agitation in time of war may contribute to the military defeat of our country. Accepting this possibility does not mean encouraging or wanting victory for Hitler, but on the contrary will encourage the total defeat of Hitler and worldwide fascism. Indeed:
“1. Revolutionary agitation led by workers in our country will exercise a powerful contagious influence on workers in the fascist countries; will provoke the break up of the rival capitalist armies, fraternisation between soldiers of both sides and the collapse of the dictatorships; and will light the flame of world revolution, the only means of defeating war and fascism, across the globe.
“2. Besides, a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class in our country will turn the imperialist war into a civil war and create the conditions for meaningful national defence: only a proletariat in control of its own destiny and defending a socialist order will be able to mount an invincible resistance to foreign fascism…”
It was with this aim of winning over German troops to a common struggle against the belligerent imperialists that in summer 1943 the French Trotskyists turned to organising among the German troops occupying France. Given the strict discipline of the Wehrmacht and the murderous anti-communism of the Gestapo (and their French accomplices, the Milice) this was incredibly dangerous, but important both in terms of teaching the French workers to repudiate the chauvinist attitudes promoted by the Communist Party and in terms of encouraging dissent among the German ranks, as had been manifested earlier in 1943 by a submarine mutiny in Brest, north-western France. The French Comités de la IVe Internationale (Fourth International Committees) produced German-language leaflets for Wehrmacht troops as well as a monthly German-language newspaper, Arbeiter und Soldat (i.e. Worker and Soldier) and built links with German troops.
This was not the only such initiative. The paper of the group associated with Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier, formerly known as la Commune but from September 1943 as le Soviet, had a German-language back page, and the group also had contacts in Germany. But more important for the Fourth International group were the efforts arising from the German troops themselves. German Trotskyist produced a paper Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen (i.e. News for the Worker[s] and Soldier[s] in the West) and furthermore a previously unorganised group of soldiers in Brittany produced Der Arbeiter (i.e. The Worker). The latter journal encouraged dissent amongst the ranks but also called on conscripted workers to “throw down your weapons and go home”, a slogan opposed by the Fourth International Committees, who wanted the workers to hang on to their weapons and carefully organise for an uprising to overthrow the Nazis before the Allied “liberators” plundered Germany. The Fourth International Committees therefore held discussions with revolutionary soldiers and tried to carry out joint agitation.
Yvan Craipeau’s book Contre vents et marées quotes the electrics worker Roland Filiâtre, one of the comrades responsible for this work (under the alias Dupont): “The French comrades started discussions with German soldiers and got them talking and giving hints of their past politics. Once they had shown themselves trustworthy, after screening they were put in touch with the German soldiers who produced Der Arbeiter and then taken care of by their organisation. The Paris region was organised as two branches. But the heart of the organisation was in Brittany, both around Nantes and in particular around Brest where the soldiers provided the party with Ausweis [identity cards] and weapons. In Brest the organisation had about fifty soldiers on average despite some people being posted elsewhere. Contacts were established in Toulon, Valence, La Rochelle and at Conches aerodrome. There was also an organisation in Belgium. Links were established with the German Trotskyist organisation, most importantly in the port of Hamburg, in Lübeck and in Rostock. Victor [a German Trotskyist, whose real name was Widelin] was responsible for these contacts. Arbeiter und Soldat was also distributed in garrisons in Italy.”
These brave efforts brought down harsh repression on the heads of the French Trotskyists, many of whom such as Yvan Craipeau had repeatedly raised the alarm in the group about certain comrades’ lack of care in evading detection. Realising these fears, young Fourth International activists imprudently but enthusiastically joined in a demonstration staged by Der Arbeiter activists through the streets of Kerhoun, singing the Internationale and thus attracted the attention of the fascist police. Not much later, in early October 1943 a meeting of Trotskyist activists and German soldiers held in Brest was found out by the Gestapo, who arrested all the participants. 17 German soldiers as well as Robert Cruau, who organised fraternisation in the region, were executed on 6 October. Once the Gestapo were on the trail, the Trotskyists were doomed. On 7 October 18 Fourth International Committees activists in Brittany were arrested, along with much of the Paris organisation. In total around fifty French activists were rounded up, and many of them were tortured, executed or sent to concentration camps. Similarly, as many as fifty Der Arbeiter soldier comrades were put to death, and their paper never reappeared. Arbeiter und Soldat was itself out of action until May 1944, such were the losses suffered by the Fourth International Committees.
For these courageous activists the class struggle never stopped: even having been arrested and taken to the Compiègne transit camp Marcel Beaufrère told his comrades that: “We are going to be deported to Buchenwald. Before leaving I want to say: we are going to meet up with German revolutionaries and make the revolution with them.” Indeed, the French Trotskyists set up a cell at the Buchenwald concentration camp and in April 1944 it managed to release a manifesto calling for: “revolutionary fraternisation with the workers in the armies of occupation. For a Germany of workers’ councils in a Europe of workers’ councils! For the world workers’ revolution!”. But the sad fact was that many of these activists would soon be murdered by the Nazis. In reality the task with which the Trotskyist movement was confronted, lifting the world working class from the abyss of imperialist war, fascism and Stalinism, was far beyond their extremely modest numbers and means. Not only the crushing of the German workers’ movement by fascism but also Stalinist misleadership and the ensuing co-option of working-class and democratic struggle by the Allied imperialists meant that working-class revolution as had been seen at the end of the war twenty-five years previously was nigh-on impossible. Despite all these difficulties the Trotskyists fought to promote the internationalist Marxist tradition, and here we reproduce the surviving propaganda distributed among German troops occupying France in 1943-44, both the collection of Arbeiter und Soldat and the sole extant fragment of Zeitung für Arbeiter und Soldat im Westen.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Lambertists
Pierre Lambert was in his time one of those “orthodox Trotskyists” who kept a banner of anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism flying in the worst years of Cold War and declining class struggle.
They tried — incoherently, but they tried — to resist the move of most “orthodox Trotskyists”, in the early 1950s, to see the Stalinist parties as the “owners” of all short-term revolutionary possibilities; they tried to sustain the idea of building an independent revolutionary working-class party against both capitalism and Stalinism.
Today the “Lambertist” organisation, now known as the Parti des Travailleurs (“Workers’ Party”), is a shadow of its former self. It has lost the thousands-strong activist base which Lambert won in the 1970s; it retains only some cranky ideas and a bureaucratic internal regime to remind Lambert’s disciples of what once was. The death of the sect-leader Lambert is far less sad than the tale of those who followed him, committed revolutionaries who acquiesced to the rule of an petty tyrant and his coterie in the belief that they were contributing to the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity, and were politically destroyed and demoralised by the experience.
Lambert’s early record was rather better. Having joined the Trotskyist movement in 1939, Lambert was arrested in the early months of the Second World War and sentenced to a year in prison for his “anti-militarist” attitude to the French government. Escaping en route to prison, Lambert joined Henri Molinier’s La Commune group, but was soon expelled due to his hostility to the organisation’s efforts to win supporters from the Nazi-collaborationist Rassemblement National Populaire.
In 1943 Lambert joined the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, which the following year merged into the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), an ancestor not just of the Parti des Travailleurs but also of another current French Trotskyist group, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.
By the end of the Nazi occupation, there were maybe three hundred Trotskyists in the PCI in France. These activists attempted to organise unrest in industry as well as promote working-class internationalism, using the slogan “behind every Nazi soldier is a German worker!” to combat the French chauvinist ideas of the Kremlin-backed Parti Communiste Français, whose watchword was “everyone kill a German”. Facing tough circumstances, the PCI mounted a heroic effort to propagandise for socialism among the German troops, organising the clandestine production and distribution of a newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat (“Worker and Soldier”). No doubt, the PCI bent the stick too far with its June 1944 claim that the Normandy landings would see no improvement over the rule of the fascist Vichy government. It took a while before they could recognise that bourgeois democracy was in fact being restored in France. Their hopes that the end of the Second World War would end with a revolutionary wave akin to the struggles of 1917-1923 proved to be naive. Nonetheless the group had a firm orientation to working-class political independence.
That was more than could be said for the Parti Communiste Français which allied itself to Charles de Gaulle and served in a cross-class government after the end of the war. Among many Communist Party crimes in this period perhaps the most ignominious was its complicity in the bombing of Sétif in Algeria — overseen by its Minister of Aviation, Tillon — which left 45,000 dead. The Trotskyists supported national liberation movements in France’s colonies — for example organising Marseilles dockers not to load arms into boats headed for Indochina.
But the CP’s patriotic aura from the Resistance, and the great prestige of the Soviet Union, assured it a dominant role in the working-class movement, with over a million members and near-monopoly control of the apparatus of the largest union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail.
Pierre Lambert became the central trade union organiser for the PCI, which grew to about 1000 members by 1947.
The PCI was divided. Yvan Craipeau, Paul Parisot, Albert Demaziere were influenced by the arguments of the American Trotskyist Felix Morrow, who called for less declamatory revolutionism, more attention to concrete political demands including simple democratic demands, and more recognition of the realities of relative bourgeois stabilisation. They hoped to build a broad party by merging with the left-moving youth of the social-democratic SFIO.
A minority, led by Pierre Frank, Marcel Bleibtreu, and others, denounced Craipeau’s group as “right wing”. Lambert was not a major figure in these political battles.
Since 1944 the CP had been able to prevent almost all strike action. In April-May 1947 the dam broke, in a big strike at the Renault Billancourt car factory. Trotskyists played a big role in this; Pierre Bois, a member of a forerunner group of today’s Lutte Ouvrière was a strike leader, and PCI members were also active at Renault.
The Communist Party left the government coalition. In November-December 1947 the CP launched a big strike wave, but pretty much as a political gambit to counter the harder attitude De Gaulle and the bourgeois parties were taking to the CP with the development of the Cold War.
The right wing in the CGT, with CIA backing — and a fair number of left-wingers, too, including anarcho-syndicalists — split from the CGT to form a new confederation, Force Ouvrière.
At first the rise in strikes encouraged the PCI. The “left wing” of Frank and Bleibtreu won a majority at the November 1947 congress of the PCI. Agitation to “build the revolutionary party” became more strident.
The strikes, however, were the start not of a real rise in working-class self-assertion, but of the dark years of the Cold War. The Communist Party waged war on all Trotskyists and independent minded revolutionaries in the labour movement, hounding its opponents out of the CGT, breaking up meetings and perpetrating physical assaults.
In early 1948 the PCI suffered a major collapse. Its weekly paper stopped appearing after 16 April 1948; it resumed regular publication, and then in diminished format, only from November, with just three issues published in the interim.
Most of the left wing Socialist Party youth went into to Jean-Paul Sartre’s short-lived Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire; so did many of the Craipeau wing of the PCI. Two smaller groups in the PCI who believed the Soviet Union to be state capitalist also left.
The rump PCI struggled to reorient itself in a world that was developing in a way completely different from what they had expected.
For a while, activity with the “Titoites” — supporters of the Tito regime in Yugoslavia, which had fallen out with Stalin in summer 1948 — appeared to offer the PCI a way out. Like many Trotskyists, Lambert had been expelled from the CGT in 1950. He started work in Force Ouvrière, and, helped by funds from the Yugoslav embassy, was able to start a newsletter advocating trade-union unity on a democratic basis. The PCI also organised some 3000 volunteers to go to Yugoslavia in work brigades.
But all that was based on gross illusions about the nature of the Tito regime; ended embarrassedly when Tito backed the USA in the Korean war; and anyway brought the PCI little profit.
Michel Pablo, the main international leader of “orthodox Trotskyism”, started to argue that a Third World War between the USA and the Stalinist bloc was imminent and certain; that in that war, the Communist Parties would be forced into a “roughly revolutionary orientation against capitalism”; and that Trotskyists should therefore join the Communist Parties.
Bleibtreu and others criticised Pablo (though, in hindsight, very insufficiently: their attitude to Tito and Mao was no more critical than Pablo’s). They rejected Pablo’s notion that world politics was defined by the two “blocs”, US imperialism and Stalinism; they contested Pablo’s ideas that there was no point in opposing World War Three and that in any case nothing of any significance could be done before World War Three.
Lambert still played little role in the theoretical debates. But he tended towards Bleibtreu, who had a majority in the PCI. And then in early 1952 Pablo instructed the PCI to send most of its activists into the French Communist Party.
The PCI readily agreed to send a limited number of peopple in to do “fraction work” within the CP. Pablo insisted that the PCI must send its leading activists in, even if they would have to make grovelling denunciations of their Trotskyist “past” in order to gain entry — and, of course, in those days of high Stalinism, they would have to.
The PCI split. A majority, maybe 150 as compared to the thousand members of 1947, defied Pablo. A couple of dozen, with Frank, complied. Lambert, with his trade union work relying on networks in Force Ouvriere, went with Bleibtreu.
Lambert was still not the “leader” of the group. Over the next three years or so, he became that. The “theoreticians”, Bleibtreu, Michel Lequenne, Jacques Danos, Marcel Gibelin, were forced out between 1953 and 1955.
From all accounts, this was not just a matter of Lambert being authoritarian. Bleibtreu and the others were demoralised and disoriented. They were flummoxed, and understandably so, by the way the world had turned out.
Lambert had no better theories. But he did have ideas about what to do, organisational talent and energy to make them happen, and a temperament that left him not too bothered about the theoretical issues.
Lambert developed contacts among left wingers in Force Ouvriere and in the Socialist Party, and in the wing of the Algerian independence movement led by Messali Hadj. Operationally, in the mid 50s, the Lambert group became almost a variety of anarcho-syndicalism.
Its paper La Vérité had headlines like: “The odious comedy of elections will change nothing. Let’s prepare the struggle for power!” (16 December 1955); “General strike for bread and peace” (28 September 1956 and against 19 September 1957); “War and poverty or socialist revolution” (27 December 1956); and “The general strike can win 10,000 francs increase for all and peace in Algeria” (17 October 1957). Week after week it hammed away on the call for troops out of Algeria, wage increases, and a general strike to win them.
1958 brought a sudden shock and a drastic shift in orientation. In May 1958, General De Gaulle was brought back to power by a military coup, executed by the army in Algeria. He abolished the old parliamentary constitution and set up a new presidential “Fifth Republic”. As it turned out, De Gaulle would retain an essentially bourgeois-democratic regime rather than going further, and concede independence to Algeria; but many leftists thought they faced a military dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Messali Hadj’s movement was eclipsed by the rival Algerian-nationalist FLN, and moved towards compromise with De Gaulle.
Dismayed, the Lambertists shut down their weekly paper, declaring that “It is not slogans for action, which is impossible for now, that the vanguard workers need today”. In the modest duplicated bulletin they started to replace it, they wrote: “The working class today is incapable of intervening as such in political struggles”.
A heavy stress on defensive demands, on the “workers’ united front”, and on deep burrowing within trade-union officialdom, came to be the hallmarks of the Lambert group.
They developed extensive contacts within the world of free-masonry and a habit of having “undercover” members in the most unlikely places. Lionel Jospin, who would eventually become Socialist Party prime minister, turns out to have been still been paying dues to the Lambertist group as late as 1987, when Jospin was already a well-integrated part of the inner circle round Socialist Party president Francois Mitterrand.
The 1952 split in the PCI merged into an international split in “orthodox Trotskyism” in 1953. Lambert joined a new international network with Gerry Healy in Britain and James P Cannon and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA. They were known as the International Committee of the Fourth International.
In 1963 Healy’s and Lambert’s groups separated from the Americans. In 1970 Lambert would split from Healy, rejecting the British group’s increasingly manic ultra-leftism; but by the 1960s Lambert’s group, in its internal organisation, had become much like Healy’s.
There was a culture of top-down control, rather than of democracy. More and more, everything was centred round Lambert’s efforts to build a strong organisational machine and to establish a network of contacts and influence around by bending the ears of people in prominent positions. At the end, all the general secretaries of Force Ouvriere for the last forty years felt obliged to honour Lambert by attending his funeral.
Lambert’s most famous ally was Alexandre Hébert. Hébert, a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist, was operationally a careerist bureaucrat and the little Napoleon of the Force Ouvrière union in Loire-Atlantique from 1947 until 1992 (now succeeded by his own son, Patrick!). Moreover, as I discovered when I interviewed Hébert in researching a study of May 1968, his attitudes to immigrants are racist. In 1995, he contributed to Jean-Marie le Pen’s paper Français d’abord (“The French first”), outlining his hostility towards immigrants. Hébert and his periphery joined the Parti des Travailleurs.
From the early 1960s, the Lambert group grew again. It had won over a very slow trickle of discontented CPers and well-known intellectuals such as the historians Jean-Jacques Marie and Pierre Broué. It grew seriously among students, and began to copy the Healy view that its sect was the revolutionary party in embryo. The most startling example was the group’s attitude towards the student movements of the late 1960s and the general strike of May-June 1968.
Despite the low ebb of the workers’ movement, the years leading up to “May ‘68” saw a rise in student activism, with questions such as the Fouchet plan’s technocratic reorganisation of the education system, war in Vietnam, and sexual radicalism feeding a burgeoning movement.
The Lambertists’ CLER was the largest student organisation to the left of the Communist Party. It favoured basic bread-and-butter student unionism and stressed that building their own organisation was the best way of fighting the Fouchet reforms. The sexual revolution was very much off the agenda of this group! Eschewing meaningful engagement in anti-war activity with the youth group JCR (close to the mainstream Fourth International) or the Maoist youth, the UJCml, the CLER imitated the Lambertists in industry and arranged a panoply of “action committees”, “co-ordination committees” and “committees for struggle” which were in reality very shallow fronts for their own organisation. CLER was however (of course!) interested in taking positions in the bureaucracy of the students’ union UNEF!
Over the winter of 1967-1968, as Strasbourg and Nantes universities and the Nanterre Faculty of Paris University saw rising waves of student activism, including anti-war demonstrations, occupying halls of residence in protest against gender segregation, and large student strikes, the Lambertists focused their efforts on building a rally of their own members and periphery, looking to galvanise their “party” rather than agitate in broader movements.
The January/February 1968 issue of the CLER newspaper Révoltes carried a call for “a rally of 3,500 youth at the Mutualité on the 29-30 June”, and articles on both domestic and international politics ended with a call for activists to attend this event, as if it were some catch-all solution. The next month, the April issue of Révoltes, had the same theme. One might have assumed that the plans for a rally like this would have been shelved in early May, when protests leading to the occupation of the Sorbonne by police, street battles which pitched students and young workers against the riot cops and anger at the victimisation of student activists signified great unrest among the student population. Even if other groups had played a greater role in setting events in motion than the Lambertists, a revolutionary organisation worth its salt would have wanted to get involved in the struggle. Yet Lambert’s group abstained.
The most notable flashpoint came on the evening of 10 May 1968, when a demonstration of students, lycée pupils and young workers through Paris, protesting against the police occupation of the Sorbonne, met with lines of riot police and blockades in the Latin Quarter. After several days of skirmishes and small clashes, both sides were spoiling for a fight. The demonstrators levered up cobblestones, benches and street signs to construct some sixty barricades, with eight-foot paving slabs for foundations.
Twenty thousand people stood their ground against police aggression, piling up branches, petrol-soaked pieces of wood and even cars to fend off a police attack. The JCR occupied a flat as a command base and communicated to activists over the radio. But where were the Lambertists?
Having refused to cancel a planned “vanguard” meeting at the Mutualité to organise the demonstration for 13 May, the Lambertists’ five hundred-strong contingent did not reach the Latin Quarter until one in the morning, marching up to the barricades in close formation and holding red banners aloft. Upon their arrival on the front line the group’s leaders grandly announced to the protestors that they refused to “risk the necks of the revolutionary vanguard” in a supposedly pointless fight, and — calling upon the students to “disperse and organise strike committees” — promptly marched away again. Révoltes explained that “without the revolutionary party, there can be no victorious struggle. We know that we represent the only force able to organise the workers’ and students’ fight.”
Knowing that in fact they had already lost any opportunity to organise the workers’ and students’ fight from the outside themselves, the Lambertists had already gone home when the police launched their three-hour campaign to clear the streets of protestors by means of tear gas and truncheons.
The organisation was not all bad. The first factory occupation in 1968 was the direct result of the agitation of Yvon Rocton, an OCI member who was a Force Ouvrière militant at the Sud-Aviation aircraft plant near Nantes. Rocton had built up an activist base at the plant, whose workers were fighting a difficult campaign against cuts in working hours, and the strength of the student movement and the crisis of de Gaulle’s administration gave impulse to more radical workers to risk the occupation tactic rather than just occasional strikes. Rocton was able to win the argument for an occupation of the factory, but the workers also kept their boss as a prisoner in his office for over two weeks during the occupation.
The efforts of Alexandre Hébert were rather less admirable. With the Nantes police force in disarray following the sacking of their headquarters on 13 May, and the local council in considerable trouble as groups of workers in the suburbs of the city began to take over food and petrol distribution for themselves, Hébert arranged with the leader of the social-democrat local government and the head of the police (who, like Hébert, were freemasons) for the trade unions to take over the administration of the Town Hall. It was not “dual power”, as described in some accounts; at Hébert’s instigation the trade unions sought to prop up the authorities and face off spontaneous working-class action. The local authorities did not react at all to the union bureaucrats’ “taking power”, and were even invited to speak at public meetings staged by the unions for the sake of public information. As Noir et Rouge explained.
“Given the deficiency of the old authorities (police prefecture and municipal government) but also with their active support, the trade unions jointly used their respective organisations, and supporting bodies, to put in place a new power structure. Far from reopening the huge modern distribution centres — of which the workers were on strike — which would have meant taking “risks” and an attack on the rule of private property, instead they supported the small-scale farmers and shopkeepers. Stuck in the middle between this ‘social base’ of theirs and the old police and administrative apparatus, the inter-trade union committee would limit itself to pathetic vacillation until the ‘return to normality’.”
It was such bureaucratic manoeuvres that marked Pierre Lambert’s decline, rather than the grotesque physical assaults and sexual abuse of Gerry Healy committed against comrades of the OCI’s sister organisation in Britain.
The Lambert organisation constantly declared itself to be going from strength to strength, never reviewing its own problems; but in fact, after growing in the 1970s, it declined in the 1980s. Lambert expelled most of his close collaborators, one after another: Michel Varga, Charles Berg, Pierre Broué, Stéphane Just...
At the same time the Lambertists puffed up a ridiculous posture of openness. They declared a new “broad” party, the Parti des Travailleurs, supposedly comprising Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist “currents”. In fact, the group is weak (except in Force Ouvriere officialdom!), and the diverse “currents” fictional.
The Parti des Travailleurs complains that the European Union is an affront to the “sovereignty” of France and calls for the “defence of the Republic”. The EU is blamed as primarily responsible for almost all social ills, and the Lambertists denounce “Brussels” is a vehicle for the agenda of the Vatican. In the 2007 Presidential elections the Parti des Travailleurs promoted Gérard Schivardi, who declared himself the “candidate of the mayors” and stressed that he would defend “mayors’ rights” against the Paris government.
It is hard to look at the career of Pierre Lambert and think of him as a defiant opponent of Stalinism or a fighter for the working class. In reality, he was neither, and the sectarian mores of his organisation were matched by its complete lack of internal democracy and debate and the ensuing stagnation of ideas.
Of course, his comrades’ intervention in the labour movement was not wholly fruitless. But essentially the activity of the Lambertist group came to be geared towards sect-building and winning influence among trade union bureaucrats rather than encouraging the working class to organise itself. Lambert’s story, in the end, is an object lesson in sectarianism, a sad chapter in the history of the Trotskyist left.
They tried — incoherently, but they tried — to resist the move of most “orthodox Trotskyists”, in the early 1950s, to see the Stalinist parties as the “owners” of all short-term revolutionary possibilities; they tried to sustain the idea of building an independent revolutionary working-class party against both capitalism and Stalinism.
Today the “Lambertist” organisation, now known as the Parti des Travailleurs (“Workers’ Party”), is a shadow of its former self. It has lost the thousands-strong activist base which Lambert won in the 1970s; it retains only some cranky ideas and a bureaucratic internal regime to remind Lambert’s disciples of what once was. The death of the sect-leader Lambert is far less sad than the tale of those who followed him, committed revolutionaries who acquiesced to the rule of an petty tyrant and his coterie in the belief that they were contributing to the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity, and were politically destroyed and demoralised by the experience.
Lambert’s early record was rather better. Having joined the Trotskyist movement in 1939, Lambert was arrested in the early months of the Second World War and sentenced to a year in prison for his “anti-militarist” attitude to the French government. Escaping en route to prison, Lambert joined Henri Molinier’s La Commune group, but was soon expelled due to his hostility to the organisation’s efforts to win supporters from the Nazi-collaborationist Rassemblement National Populaire.
In 1943 Lambert joined the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, which the following year merged into the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), an ancestor not just of the Parti des Travailleurs but also of another current French Trotskyist group, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.
By the end of the Nazi occupation, there were maybe three hundred Trotskyists in the PCI in France. These activists attempted to organise unrest in industry as well as promote working-class internationalism, using the slogan “behind every Nazi soldier is a German worker!” to combat the French chauvinist ideas of the Kremlin-backed Parti Communiste Français, whose watchword was “everyone kill a German”. Facing tough circumstances, the PCI mounted a heroic effort to propagandise for socialism among the German troops, organising the clandestine production and distribution of a newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat (“Worker and Soldier”). No doubt, the PCI bent the stick too far with its June 1944 claim that the Normandy landings would see no improvement over the rule of the fascist Vichy government. It took a while before they could recognise that bourgeois democracy was in fact being restored in France. Their hopes that the end of the Second World War would end with a revolutionary wave akin to the struggles of 1917-1923 proved to be naive. Nonetheless the group had a firm orientation to working-class political independence.
That was more than could be said for the Parti Communiste Français which allied itself to Charles de Gaulle and served in a cross-class government after the end of the war. Among many Communist Party crimes in this period perhaps the most ignominious was its complicity in the bombing of Sétif in Algeria — overseen by its Minister of Aviation, Tillon — which left 45,000 dead. The Trotskyists supported national liberation movements in France’s colonies — for example organising Marseilles dockers not to load arms into boats headed for Indochina.
But the CP’s patriotic aura from the Resistance, and the great prestige of the Soviet Union, assured it a dominant role in the working-class movement, with over a million members and near-monopoly control of the apparatus of the largest union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail.
Pierre Lambert became the central trade union organiser for the PCI, which grew to about 1000 members by 1947.
The PCI was divided. Yvan Craipeau, Paul Parisot, Albert Demaziere were influenced by the arguments of the American Trotskyist Felix Morrow, who called for less declamatory revolutionism, more attention to concrete political demands including simple democratic demands, and more recognition of the realities of relative bourgeois stabilisation. They hoped to build a broad party by merging with the left-moving youth of the social-democratic SFIO.
A minority, led by Pierre Frank, Marcel Bleibtreu, and others, denounced Craipeau’s group as “right wing”. Lambert was not a major figure in these political battles.
Since 1944 the CP had been able to prevent almost all strike action. In April-May 1947 the dam broke, in a big strike at the Renault Billancourt car factory. Trotskyists played a big role in this; Pierre Bois, a member of a forerunner group of today’s Lutte Ouvrière was a strike leader, and PCI members were also active at Renault.
The Communist Party left the government coalition. In November-December 1947 the CP launched a big strike wave, but pretty much as a political gambit to counter the harder attitude De Gaulle and the bourgeois parties were taking to the CP with the development of the Cold War.
The right wing in the CGT, with CIA backing — and a fair number of left-wingers, too, including anarcho-syndicalists — split from the CGT to form a new confederation, Force Ouvrière.
At first the rise in strikes encouraged the PCI. The “left wing” of Frank and Bleibtreu won a majority at the November 1947 congress of the PCI. Agitation to “build the revolutionary party” became more strident.
The strikes, however, were the start not of a real rise in working-class self-assertion, but of the dark years of the Cold War. The Communist Party waged war on all Trotskyists and independent minded revolutionaries in the labour movement, hounding its opponents out of the CGT, breaking up meetings and perpetrating physical assaults.
In early 1948 the PCI suffered a major collapse. Its weekly paper stopped appearing after 16 April 1948; it resumed regular publication, and then in diminished format, only from November, with just three issues published in the interim.
Most of the left wing Socialist Party youth went into to Jean-Paul Sartre’s short-lived Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire; so did many of the Craipeau wing of the PCI. Two smaller groups in the PCI who believed the Soviet Union to be state capitalist also left.
The rump PCI struggled to reorient itself in a world that was developing in a way completely different from what they had expected.
For a while, activity with the “Titoites” — supporters of the Tito regime in Yugoslavia, which had fallen out with Stalin in summer 1948 — appeared to offer the PCI a way out. Like many Trotskyists, Lambert had been expelled from the CGT in 1950. He started work in Force Ouvrière, and, helped by funds from the Yugoslav embassy, was able to start a newsletter advocating trade-union unity on a democratic basis. The PCI also organised some 3000 volunteers to go to Yugoslavia in work brigades.
But all that was based on gross illusions about the nature of the Tito regime; ended embarrassedly when Tito backed the USA in the Korean war; and anyway brought the PCI little profit.
Michel Pablo, the main international leader of “orthodox Trotskyism”, started to argue that a Third World War between the USA and the Stalinist bloc was imminent and certain; that in that war, the Communist Parties would be forced into a “roughly revolutionary orientation against capitalism”; and that Trotskyists should therefore join the Communist Parties.
Bleibtreu and others criticised Pablo (though, in hindsight, very insufficiently: their attitude to Tito and Mao was no more critical than Pablo’s). They rejected Pablo’s notion that world politics was defined by the two “blocs”, US imperialism and Stalinism; they contested Pablo’s ideas that there was no point in opposing World War Three and that in any case nothing of any significance could be done before World War Three.
Lambert still played little role in the theoretical debates. But he tended towards Bleibtreu, who had a majority in the PCI. And then in early 1952 Pablo instructed the PCI to send most of its activists into the French Communist Party.
The PCI readily agreed to send a limited number of peopple in to do “fraction work” within the CP. Pablo insisted that the PCI must send its leading activists in, even if they would have to make grovelling denunciations of their Trotskyist “past” in order to gain entry — and, of course, in those days of high Stalinism, they would have to.
The PCI split. A majority, maybe 150 as compared to the thousand members of 1947, defied Pablo. A couple of dozen, with Frank, complied. Lambert, with his trade union work relying on networks in Force Ouvriere, went with Bleibtreu.
Lambert was still not the “leader” of the group. Over the next three years or so, he became that. The “theoreticians”, Bleibtreu, Michel Lequenne, Jacques Danos, Marcel Gibelin, were forced out between 1953 and 1955.
From all accounts, this was not just a matter of Lambert being authoritarian. Bleibtreu and the others were demoralised and disoriented. They were flummoxed, and understandably so, by the way the world had turned out.
Lambert had no better theories. But he did have ideas about what to do, organisational talent and energy to make them happen, and a temperament that left him not too bothered about the theoretical issues.
Lambert developed contacts among left wingers in Force Ouvriere and in the Socialist Party, and in the wing of the Algerian independence movement led by Messali Hadj. Operationally, in the mid 50s, the Lambert group became almost a variety of anarcho-syndicalism.
Its paper La Vérité had headlines like: “The odious comedy of elections will change nothing. Let’s prepare the struggle for power!” (16 December 1955); “General strike for bread and peace” (28 September 1956 and against 19 September 1957); “War and poverty or socialist revolution” (27 December 1956); and “The general strike can win 10,000 francs increase for all and peace in Algeria” (17 October 1957). Week after week it hammed away on the call for troops out of Algeria, wage increases, and a general strike to win them.
1958 brought a sudden shock and a drastic shift in orientation. In May 1958, General De Gaulle was brought back to power by a military coup, executed by the army in Algeria. He abolished the old parliamentary constitution and set up a new presidential “Fifth Republic”. As it turned out, De Gaulle would retain an essentially bourgeois-democratic regime rather than going further, and concede independence to Algeria; but many leftists thought they faced a military dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Messali Hadj’s movement was eclipsed by the rival Algerian-nationalist FLN, and moved towards compromise with De Gaulle.
Dismayed, the Lambertists shut down their weekly paper, declaring that “It is not slogans for action, which is impossible for now, that the vanguard workers need today”. In the modest duplicated bulletin they started to replace it, they wrote: “The working class today is incapable of intervening as such in political struggles”.
A heavy stress on defensive demands, on the “workers’ united front”, and on deep burrowing within trade-union officialdom, came to be the hallmarks of the Lambert group.
They developed extensive contacts within the world of free-masonry and a habit of having “undercover” members in the most unlikely places. Lionel Jospin, who would eventually become Socialist Party prime minister, turns out to have been still been paying dues to the Lambertist group as late as 1987, when Jospin was already a well-integrated part of the inner circle round Socialist Party president Francois Mitterrand.
The 1952 split in the PCI merged into an international split in “orthodox Trotskyism” in 1953. Lambert joined a new international network with Gerry Healy in Britain and James P Cannon and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA. They were known as the International Committee of the Fourth International.
In 1963 Healy’s and Lambert’s groups separated from the Americans. In 1970 Lambert would split from Healy, rejecting the British group’s increasingly manic ultra-leftism; but by the 1960s Lambert’s group, in its internal organisation, had become much like Healy’s.
There was a culture of top-down control, rather than of democracy. More and more, everything was centred round Lambert’s efforts to build a strong organisational machine and to establish a network of contacts and influence around by bending the ears of people in prominent positions. At the end, all the general secretaries of Force Ouvriere for the last forty years felt obliged to honour Lambert by attending his funeral.
Lambert’s most famous ally was Alexandre Hébert. Hébert, a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist, was operationally a careerist bureaucrat and the little Napoleon of the Force Ouvrière union in Loire-Atlantique from 1947 until 1992 (now succeeded by his own son, Patrick!). Moreover, as I discovered when I interviewed Hébert in researching a study of May 1968, his attitudes to immigrants are racist. In 1995, he contributed to Jean-Marie le Pen’s paper Français d’abord (“The French first”), outlining his hostility towards immigrants. Hébert and his periphery joined the Parti des Travailleurs.
From the early 1960s, the Lambert group grew again. It had won over a very slow trickle of discontented CPers and well-known intellectuals such as the historians Jean-Jacques Marie and Pierre Broué. It grew seriously among students, and began to copy the Healy view that its sect was the revolutionary party in embryo. The most startling example was the group’s attitude towards the student movements of the late 1960s and the general strike of May-June 1968.
Despite the low ebb of the workers’ movement, the years leading up to “May ‘68” saw a rise in student activism, with questions such as the Fouchet plan’s technocratic reorganisation of the education system, war in Vietnam, and sexual radicalism feeding a burgeoning movement.
The Lambertists’ CLER was the largest student organisation to the left of the Communist Party. It favoured basic bread-and-butter student unionism and stressed that building their own organisation was the best way of fighting the Fouchet reforms. The sexual revolution was very much off the agenda of this group! Eschewing meaningful engagement in anti-war activity with the youth group JCR (close to the mainstream Fourth International) or the Maoist youth, the UJCml, the CLER imitated the Lambertists in industry and arranged a panoply of “action committees”, “co-ordination committees” and “committees for struggle” which were in reality very shallow fronts for their own organisation. CLER was however (of course!) interested in taking positions in the bureaucracy of the students’ union UNEF!
Over the winter of 1967-1968, as Strasbourg and Nantes universities and the Nanterre Faculty of Paris University saw rising waves of student activism, including anti-war demonstrations, occupying halls of residence in protest against gender segregation, and large student strikes, the Lambertists focused their efforts on building a rally of their own members and periphery, looking to galvanise their “party” rather than agitate in broader movements.
The January/February 1968 issue of the CLER newspaper Révoltes carried a call for “a rally of 3,500 youth at the Mutualité on the 29-30 June”, and articles on both domestic and international politics ended with a call for activists to attend this event, as if it were some catch-all solution. The next month, the April issue of Révoltes, had the same theme. One might have assumed that the plans for a rally like this would have been shelved in early May, when protests leading to the occupation of the Sorbonne by police, street battles which pitched students and young workers against the riot cops and anger at the victimisation of student activists signified great unrest among the student population. Even if other groups had played a greater role in setting events in motion than the Lambertists, a revolutionary organisation worth its salt would have wanted to get involved in the struggle. Yet Lambert’s group abstained.
The most notable flashpoint came on the evening of 10 May 1968, when a demonstration of students, lycée pupils and young workers through Paris, protesting against the police occupation of the Sorbonne, met with lines of riot police and blockades in the Latin Quarter. After several days of skirmishes and small clashes, both sides were spoiling for a fight. The demonstrators levered up cobblestones, benches and street signs to construct some sixty barricades, with eight-foot paving slabs for foundations.
Twenty thousand people stood their ground against police aggression, piling up branches, petrol-soaked pieces of wood and even cars to fend off a police attack. The JCR occupied a flat as a command base and communicated to activists over the radio. But where were the Lambertists?
Having refused to cancel a planned “vanguard” meeting at the Mutualité to organise the demonstration for 13 May, the Lambertists’ five hundred-strong contingent did not reach the Latin Quarter until one in the morning, marching up to the barricades in close formation and holding red banners aloft. Upon their arrival on the front line the group’s leaders grandly announced to the protestors that they refused to “risk the necks of the revolutionary vanguard” in a supposedly pointless fight, and — calling upon the students to “disperse and organise strike committees” — promptly marched away again. Révoltes explained that “without the revolutionary party, there can be no victorious struggle. We know that we represent the only force able to organise the workers’ and students’ fight.”
Knowing that in fact they had already lost any opportunity to organise the workers’ and students’ fight from the outside themselves, the Lambertists had already gone home when the police launched their three-hour campaign to clear the streets of protestors by means of tear gas and truncheons.
The organisation was not all bad. The first factory occupation in 1968 was the direct result of the agitation of Yvon Rocton, an OCI member who was a Force Ouvrière militant at the Sud-Aviation aircraft plant near Nantes. Rocton had built up an activist base at the plant, whose workers were fighting a difficult campaign against cuts in working hours, and the strength of the student movement and the crisis of de Gaulle’s administration gave impulse to more radical workers to risk the occupation tactic rather than just occasional strikes. Rocton was able to win the argument for an occupation of the factory, but the workers also kept their boss as a prisoner in his office for over two weeks during the occupation.
The efforts of Alexandre Hébert were rather less admirable. With the Nantes police force in disarray following the sacking of their headquarters on 13 May, and the local council in considerable trouble as groups of workers in the suburbs of the city began to take over food and petrol distribution for themselves, Hébert arranged with the leader of the social-democrat local government and the head of the police (who, like Hébert, were freemasons) for the trade unions to take over the administration of the Town Hall. It was not “dual power”, as described in some accounts; at Hébert’s instigation the trade unions sought to prop up the authorities and face off spontaneous working-class action. The local authorities did not react at all to the union bureaucrats’ “taking power”, and were even invited to speak at public meetings staged by the unions for the sake of public information. As Noir et Rouge explained.
“Given the deficiency of the old authorities (police prefecture and municipal government) but also with their active support, the trade unions jointly used their respective organisations, and supporting bodies, to put in place a new power structure. Far from reopening the huge modern distribution centres — of which the workers were on strike — which would have meant taking “risks” and an attack on the rule of private property, instead they supported the small-scale farmers and shopkeepers. Stuck in the middle between this ‘social base’ of theirs and the old police and administrative apparatus, the inter-trade union committee would limit itself to pathetic vacillation until the ‘return to normality’.”
It was such bureaucratic manoeuvres that marked Pierre Lambert’s decline, rather than the grotesque physical assaults and sexual abuse of Gerry Healy committed against comrades of the OCI’s sister organisation in Britain.
The Lambert organisation constantly declared itself to be going from strength to strength, never reviewing its own problems; but in fact, after growing in the 1970s, it declined in the 1980s. Lambert expelled most of his close collaborators, one after another: Michel Varga, Charles Berg, Pierre Broué, Stéphane Just...
At the same time the Lambertists puffed up a ridiculous posture of openness. They declared a new “broad” party, the Parti des Travailleurs, supposedly comprising Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist “currents”. In fact, the group is weak (except in Force Ouvriere officialdom!), and the diverse “currents” fictional.
The Parti des Travailleurs complains that the European Union is an affront to the “sovereignty” of France and calls for the “defence of the Republic”. The EU is blamed as primarily responsible for almost all social ills, and the Lambertists denounce “Brussels” is a vehicle for the agenda of the Vatican. In the 2007 Presidential elections the Parti des Travailleurs promoted Gérard Schivardi, who declared himself the “candidate of the mayors” and stressed that he would defend “mayors’ rights” against the Paris government.
It is hard to look at the career of Pierre Lambert and think of him as a defiant opponent of Stalinism or a fighter for the working class. In reality, he was neither, and the sectarian mores of his organisation were matched by its complete lack of internal democracy and debate and the ensuing stagnation of ideas.
Of course, his comrades’ intervention in the labour movement was not wholly fruitless. But essentially the activity of the Lambertist group came to be geared towards sect-building and winning influence among trade union bureaucrats rather than encouraging the working class to organise itself. Lambert’s story, in the end, is an object lesson in sectarianism, a sad chapter in the history of the Trotskyist left.
Monday, January 21, 2008
An anti-capitalist party for France?
After winning 1.5 million votes in the April 2007 French presidential election, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire launched a call for a new “anti-capitalist party” to bring together activists from across the spectrum of the far left in a joint organisation.
This unity effort in some ways echoes the LCR’s previous efforts to turn to other parts of the left, for example in their support for former leading Communist Party member Pierre Juquin in the 1988 presidential election. At present it is unclear what exactly the LCR plans to do – bring together the revolutionary left, or just everyone to the left of the Parti Socialiste’s Blairite leadership? Nothing has been settled as yet, although the debates at the LCR congress on January 24-27 are sure to shed more light on the matter.
However, in practical terms the most important issue at stake in any left regroupment is the LCR’s relationship with Lutte Ouvrière, the other prominent Trotskyist force in France. Their lack of unity has been a political hot potato for four decades, with occasional joint slates in municipal and European elections failing to mask the animosity between the two organisations. Much in the same way as past unity offensives have collapsed, the prospects for LCR-LO cooperation here appear dim, with the majority at LO conference eschewing the idea of a new party. It seems that all the LCR can really hope for at this point in time is to win over some individual activists, the anarchist Alternative Libertaire group, the French section of the Committee for a Workers’ International and a fraction of LO dissidents.
Many of the criticisms which Lutte Ouvrière’s conference document levels against the LCR’s project are fair comment. It decries the idea of an “anti-capitalist” party rather than one which has a working-class led socialist revolution as its explicit goal. Whatever the claims of the biggest faction in the LCR leadership, Marxists do not believe that our politics can be summarised as opposition to capitalism and big corporations. Marx's Communist Manifesto is full of polemic against "conservative socialists" and "petty-bourgeois socialists" who oppose capitalist development but are not in favour of posing a positive working-class based alternative.
LO further criticise the political softness of the LCR, who do not educate their members and periphery adequately in the Marxist tradition, but demagogically pander to “anti-neoliberal” sentiment which lacks real political content. Similarly, they attack the LCR for not learning the political lessons of Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism – as amply displayed by the LCR’s veneration of Che Guevara and the Cuban regime. Furthermore, we could point out that although they are the lone force calling for a new party, the revolutionary socialists of the LCR are softening their politics for the sake of constructing a pseudo-‘united front’ with a largely non-existent right wing – mirroring previous ventures like the Scottish Socialist Party, the Portuguese Left Bloc, the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, and so on. The “anti-capitalist” party is a construct without a real base.
However, the flaw in Lutte Ouvrière’s analysis is to abstract from their somewhat accurate criticisms of the LCR’s political culture the idea that working together in the same party is impossible. Although expressing a general sympathy for the LCR’s aims and the idea of organising activists, LO’s fundamental problem with the “anti-capitalist” party appears to be that it would not have the regimented cadre structure of Lutte Ouvrière by which the old hands channel their political outlook (supposedly the direct continuation of Leon Trotsky’s ideas) down to the less experienced membership. Unlike the LCR, LO refuse to dissolve themselves into any broader party, and so can only support the “anti-capitalist party” initiative vicariously.
“Although we wish for its success, [the proposed party] is not what we want to create and that’s why, while we watch this initiative attentively and sympathetically, we refuse to participate in building it”
A significant factor in LO’s attitude to the LCR’s project is its own organisational culture, which tolerates little dissent and seeks to recruit only those activists who are already in full agreement with the leadership line. The minority tendency which publishes Convergences Révolutionnaires, more sympathetic to the LCR, is not allowed to recruit new members to LO and has very limited space to publish its views.
In their polemic against the LCR, Lutte Ouvrière takes a patronising and elitist tone asserting their group’s own ‘purity’. For example, it describes setting up a party which recruits activists who do not define themselves as Trotskyists as “turning your back on Trotsky’s teachings” but further adds that “of course, you could describe yourself as Trotskyist and not actually be one!” - a category which purportedly includes the membership of the LCR. It is impossible to reason with the Lutte Ouvrière leaders on this score – their claim to be the sole inheritors of Marxism, Leninism (“no-one knows any more what ‘Leninism’ means”) and Trotskyism, coupled with their rigid organisational culture and belief that non-LO activists are “turning their back on all the ideas” of socialist revolution is hardly conducive to comradely debate or joint work. Indeed, rather than making proposals to the LCR to outline its conditions for unity, the LO leadership has taken an attitude along the lines of ‘we wish you all the best if you want to do your thing; but your suggestion isn’t the same as what we want, so no thanks’. As the LO conference document puts it;
“If we were to say that we hope that it succeeds… it is only because not everyone can be revolutionary and Trotskyist, but many people, particularly young people, want to fight the injustices of the present social order. Some people get involved in NGOs to help underdeveloped countries; others work closer to home helping illegal immigrants and homeless people; others are simply outraged by what the government does and want to oppose it in which ways they can. It would be a good thing if, even though not revolutionaries, these people could find a significant organisation ready to act and which shared some of their ideas.”
The LCR are not seen by LO as comrades taking part in a common struggle against capitalism, but characterised as akin to liberals and do-gooders who want to ‘make a difference’.
In contrast to this sectarian approach, the Lutte Ouvrière minority have welcomed the LCR’s new unity offensive and called for LO to use the opportunity to have a debate about what party the revolutionary socialist left needs. Even if not in agreement with the specific proposals of the LCR, or even its broader politics, LO should say what kind of left regroupment it is in favour of and what positive suggestions it can make to potential allies. After emphasising the need for unity in the face of Sarkozy’s attacks on pensions and jobs but criticising the LCR’s lack of specific perspectives, the LO minority comment;
“It is precisely in order to overcome these problems that both in terms of eventually creating a new party and in terms of intervention in struggles in the here and now we recommend regular and systematic meetings between the LCR and LO at every level, starting with the leaderships. If we haven’t already, now is time to make contact.”
At this level, it is rather hypocritical of Lutte Ouvrière to insist on their version of Trotskyist purity, given their electoral pacts with reformists and indeed their past ‘partyist’ adventures. For example, during the general strike of May 1968 their forerunners Voix Ouvrière set up a co-ordination group with the Parti Communiste Internationaliste and Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires, the two ancestor organisations of today’s LCR. In the aftermath of those struggles, LO looked to form a broad left force comprising not only these Trotskyist forces but also Maoists and the left-social-democrat Parti Socialiste Unifié.
In the struggle against Sarkozy's attacks on the working class, which are supported by the Parti Socialiste, French workers need a party of their own to give political expression to their struggles. The important question here is that the party has a clear goal of organising the working class as a class, and explicitly seeks to lead other sections of society opposed to the rule of capital in a struggle to replace it socialism, so any given programmatic differences should not be erected as barriers to unity. In a party which, unlike Lutte Ouvrière, allowed for free and full debate and platform rights, it would be possible to bring together people with different viewpoints yet still engaged in common struggle.
While revolutionary socialists should always be open about their politics and educate their activists and followers about their ideas, insistence on homogeneity, ultra-'hard' organisational discipline and bureaucratically excluding those who are not deemed to be the correct brand of 'Trotskyist' is no means by which to argue for Marxist ideas in the labour movement. It can only serve to cut off the self-proclaimed revolutionary élan as a sect without broad working class involvement.
This unity effort in some ways echoes the LCR’s previous efforts to turn to other parts of the left, for example in their support for former leading Communist Party member Pierre Juquin in the 1988 presidential election. At present it is unclear what exactly the LCR plans to do – bring together the revolutionary left, or just everyone to the left of the Parti Socialiste’s Blairite leadership? Nothing has been settled as yet, although the debates at the LCR congress on January 24-27 are sure to shed more light on the matter.
However, in practical terms the most important issue at stake in any left regroupment is the LCR’s relationship with Lutte Ouvrière, the other prominent Trotskyist force in France. Their lack of unity has been a political hot potato for four decades, with occasional joint slates in municipal and European elections failing to mask the animosity between the two organisations. Much in the same way as past unity offensives have collapsed, the prospects for LCR-LO cooperation here appear dim, with the majority at LO conference eschewing the idea of a new party. It seems that all the LCR can really hope for at this point in time is to win over some individual activists, the anarchist Alternative Libertaire group, the French section of the Committee for a Workers’ International and a fraction of LO dissidents.
Many of the criticisms which Lutte Ouvrière’s conference document levels against the LCR’s project are fair comment. It decries the idea of an “anti-capitalist” party rather than one which has a working-class led socialist revolution as its explicit goal. Whatever the claims of the biggest faction in the LCR leadership, Marxists do not believe that our politics can be summarised as opposition to capitalism and big corporations. Marx's Communist Manifesto is full of polemic against "conservative socialists" and "petty-bourgeois socialists" who oppose capitalist development but are not in favour of posing a positive working-class based alternative.
LO further criticise the political softness of the LCR, who do not educate their members and periphery adequately in the Marxist tradition, but demagogically pander to “anti-neoliberal” sentiment which lacks real political content. Similarly, they attack the LCR for not learning the political lessons of Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism – as amply displayed by the LCR’s veneration of Che Guevara and the Cuban regime. Furthermore, we could point out that although they are the lone force calling for a new party, the revolutionary socialists of the LCR are softening their politics for the sake of constructing a pseudo-‘united front’ with a largely non-existent right wing – mirroring previous ventures like the Scottish Socialist Party, the Portuguese Left Bloc, the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, and so on. The “anti-capitalist” party is a construct without a real base.
However, the flaw in Lutte Ouvrière’s analysis is to abstract from their somewhat accurate criticisms of the LCR’s political culture the idea that working together in the same party is impossible. Although expressing a general sympathy for the LCR’s aims and the idea of organising activists, LO’s fundamental problem with the “anti-capitalist” party appears to be that it would not have the regimented cadre structure of Lutte Ouvrière by which the old hands channel their political outlook (supposedly the direct continuation of Leon Trotsky’s ideas) down to the less experienced membership. Unlike the LCR, LO refuse to dissolve themselves into any broader party, and so can only support the “anti-capitalist party” initiative vicariously.
“Although we wish for its success, [the proposed party] is not what we want to create and that’s why, while we watch this initiative attentively and sympathetically, we refuse to participate in building it”
A significant factor in LO’s attitude to the LCR’s project is its own organisational culture, which tolerates little dissent and seeks to recruit only those activists who are already in full agreement with the leadership line. The minority tendency which publishes Convergences Révolutionnaires, more sympathetic to the LCR, is not allowed to recruit new members to LO and has very limited space to publish its views.
In their polemic against the LCR, Lutte Ouvrière takes a patronising and elitist tone asserting their group’s own ‘purity’. For example, it describes setting up a party which recruits activists who do not define themselves as Trotskyists as “turning your back on Trotsky’s teachings” but further adds that “of course, you could describe yourself as Trotskyist and not actually be one!” - a category which purportedly includes the membership of the LCR. It is impossible to reason with the Lutte Ouvrière leaders on this score – their claim to be the sole inheritors of Marxism, Leninism (“no-one knows any more what ‘Leninism’ means”) and Trotskyism, coupled with their rigid organisational culture and belief that non-LO activists are “turning their back on all the ideas” of socialist revolution is hardly conducive to comradely debate or joint work. Indeed, rather than making proposals to the LCR to outline its conditions for unity, the LO leadership has taken an attitude along the lines of ‘we wish you all the best if you want to do your thing; but your suggestion isn’t the same as what we want, so no thanks’. As the LO conference document puts it;
“If we were to say that we hope that it succeeds… it is only because not everyone can be revolutionary and Trotskyist, but many people, particularly young people, want to fight the injustices of the present social order. Some people get involved in NGOs to help underdeveloped countries; others work closer to home helping illegal immigrants and homeless people; others are simply outraged by what the government does and want to oppose it in which ways they can. It would be a good thing if, even though not revolutionaries, these people could find a significant organisation ready to act and which shared some of their ideas.”
The LCR are not seen by LO as comrades taking part in a common struggle against capitalism, but characterised as akin to liberals and do-gooders who want to ‘make a difference’.
In contrast to this sectarian approach, the Lutte Ouvrière minority have welcomed the LCR’s new unity offensive and called for LO to use the opportunity to have a debate about what party the revolutionary socialist left needs. Even if not in agreement with the specific proposals of the LCR, or even its broader politics, LO should say what kind of left regroupment it is in favour of and what positive suggestions it can make to potential allies. After emphasising the need for unity in the face of Sarkozy’s attacks on pensions and jobs but criticising the LCR’s lack of specific perspectives, the LO minority comment;
“It is precisely in order to overcome these problems that both in terms of eventually creating a new party and in terms of intervention in struggles in the here and now we recommend regular and systematic meetings between the LCR and LO at every level, starting with the leaderships. If we haven’t already, now is time to make contact.”
At this level, it is rather hypocritical of Lutte Ouvrière to insist on their version of Trotskyist purity, given their electoral pacts with reformists and indeed their past ‘partyist’ adventures. For example, during the general strike of May 1968 their forerunners Voix Ouvrière set up a co-ordination group with the Parti Communiste Internationaliste and Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires, the two ancestor organisations of today’s LCR. In the aftermath of those struggles, LO looked to form a broad left force comprising not only these Trotskyist forces but also Maoists and the left-social-democrat Parti Socialiste Unifié.
In the struggle against Sarkozy's attacks on the working class, which are supported by the Parti Socialiste, French workers need a party of their own to give political expression to their struggles. The important question here is that the party has a clear goal of organising the working class as a class, and explicitly seeks to lead other sections of society opposed to the rule of capital in a struggle to replace it socialism, so any given programmatic differences should not be erected as barriers to unity. In a party which, unlike Lutte Ouvrière, allowed for free and full debate and platform rights, it would be possible to bring together people with different viewpoints yet still engaged in common struggle.
While revolutionary socialists should always be open about their politics and educate their activists and followers about their ideas, insistence on homogeneity, ultra-'hard' organisational discipline and bureaucratically excluding those who are not deemed to be the correct brand of 'Trotskyist' is no means by which to argue for Marxist ideas in the labour movement. It can only serve to cut off the self-proclaimed revolutionary élan as a sect without broad working class involvement.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Sarkozyism, Gaullism or fascism?
Upon the election of Nicolas Sarkozy there was a strong current in the media – both in France and internationally – claiming that ‘things had changed’. Sarkozy, it was said, was the man who would cut back the ‘gluttonous’ French state, ‘modernising’ the economy by curbing the power of the unions and replacing the France of the 35-hour-week with a new more ‘flexible’ culture that values ‘hard work’. French workers had to prepare for Sarkozy’s onslaught. As we have seen with November’s rail strikes, university occupations and rioting in the suburbs, resistance to Sarkozy is deep-rooted.
Certain activists have been keen to portray Sarkozy as a novel threat, whether that means using the catch-cry ‘Sarko-facho’ (‘Sarkozy-fascist’); portraying him as nothing but a lickspittle of George Bush; or, as the Iranian media now have it, a Mossad agent. Yet most of the French President’s pronouncements seem to be in tune with the anti-working class, conservative and authoritarian political tradition of General de Gaulle. We only have to think back to spring 2006 when the previous UMP [Gaullist] government attempted to introduce the CPE law to undermine young workers’ job stability, or 2005 when it backed the EU Constitution. The continuity in the history of the French right is examined in some detail in the latest issue of the Ni Patrie ni Frontières journal, which devotes some 62 pages to assessing the character of so-called ‘Sarkozyism’.
Sarkozy has taken on great personal power, setting great store by his own image and casting himself as somewhat of a national saviour, in the mould of de Gaulle or a Napoleon. But NPNF argues that the frivolous labelling of Sarkozy as some sort of ‘fascist’ – who thereby ought to be excluded from ‘normal’ politics – is to ignore the real threat he poses in common with any bourgeois government:
Rather than concentrating on his economic and social programme, strongly opposed to the interests of the working class, much of the anti-Sarkozy propaganda makes out that he is more than just an enemy of the working class. A monster.
The assertion that Sarkozy represents an ‘Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal’ current can also be misleading. True, the main thrust of his anti-trade union and privatising agenda is echoic of Margaret Thatcher (hence the nickname ‘Monsieur Thatcher’, a characterisation which he does not seem particularly keen to dispel). Yet the claim that he is not a normal French bourgeois politician, but really just a lackey of George Bush, seems just to reflect the myth of a ‘republican collective’ of ‘traditional’ political debate, counterposed to ‘outsider’ elements not native to French politics:
Most discussion of the alleged Atlanticism of the right has just one goal: reintroducing the age-old threats of the Foreign Party, or even Fifth Column (using chauvinist themes to silence opponents) and, as a result, embolden Gaullist myths. This idea is spouted by a united front running from the [liberal monthly] Monde diplomatique to the PCF [Communist Party] passing via the PS [Socialist Party] and a decent chunk of the UMP [Gaullists]. Ultimately these people want to exalt the “national fabric” of St. Louis, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle. All of them gargle about the “French mindset”, “French exception”, “French tradition” and other red herrings.
The history of the once million-strong Parti Communiste Francais is indicative here. After participating in the 1936-38 anti-fascist ‘Popular Front’ government of socialists and bourgeois liberals, Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez called upon ‘patriotic’ French far-right goons to join a ‘French front’ against Nazism, and himself joined the French army. After World War II the Communists served in a national unity government with Charles de Gaulle for two years, yet after 1958’s military coup in Algiers, which provoked the downfall of the Fourth Republic and a new administration headed by de Gaulle, he was himself termed a ‘fascist’. Throughout these episodes the rhetoric of ‘anti-fascism’ could be used to justify cross-class alliances, since it represented politics as a battle where ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘republican’ parties fought against ‘fascists’ rather than as a struggle between classes.
Indeed, nowadays crying ‘fascist’ in the face of Sarkozy’s attacks on the working class tends to imply support the opposition Socialist Party – a party with a limited base in the working class and no organic links to the labour movement - instead. Yet, as NPNF points out:
What Sarkozy said in his election campaign pushed the same buttons as Ségolène Royal, his rival in the presidential contest. Both played on the theme of “security”, both are opposed to open borders and free migration, both vaunted the merits of those who “work hard” and “get up early”, and both condemned May 1968, even if for marginally different reasons.
The PS and Royal herself have supported Sarkozy’s ‘modernisation’ agenda, only making the vaguest criticisms. Royal opposed the rail workers’ strike, excusing pensions cuts in much the same way as her British counterpart in Number Ten might. The students’ union UNEF, dominated by the PS, was consulted in the elaboration of Sarkozy’s university privatisation plan, and since then has done nothing to organise opposition. Royal like Sarkozy backs the riot cops in the suburbs, although no doubt could suggest a more ‘touchy-feely’ way of batting down the unemployed black youth. Such is the consensus among the capitalist class that Sarkozy was even able to persuade Bernard Kouchner, a leading figure in the PS, to serve as foreign minister in the UMP government. The parallels between Sarkozy’s fishing for ministers outside the UMP and Gordon Brown’s courting of Digby Jones, Tory MPs and Paddy Ashdown for his “government of all the talents” are clear.
Sarkozy’s individual ‘reforms’ are part of a general agenda of privatisation and casualisation of employment so that France can compete on the world stage, one inherited from his predecessors. There is no solace to be found in supporting liberals and right-wing ‘social democrats’ here, since they share these essential perspectives. But neither does capitalism run by the bourgeois state represent an alternative to the kind of economy that Nicolas Sarkozy and the soft-Gaullist “Socialist Party” alike wish to achieve. NPNF cuts sharply against those who respond to Sarkozy by harking back to the days when the French state had greater penetration in economic life:
What exactly does the word “neo-liberal” mean in a society where most of the means of production rest in private hands and yet the state is the largest employer and has for a long time planned the economy? Have people forgotten that de Gaulle, after 1946, launched an “economic recovery plan” and that from 1958 he used Three-Year Plans?
“Neo-liberalism” is a vague notion even among its supporters, never mind its confused opponents. On the right, it is used to criticise the state’s “redistributive” actions (which in fact consist of taxing single and healthy workers and those who have a fixed job and then giving the money to the unemployed, the ill and people with kids) except when they are in favour of the bosses (you’ve never seen a boss complain about getting a subsidy or an anti-working class law).
On the left and far left it is a means of demanding state control (full or partial) of Capital, without at all calling for the overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of hierarchy, money, wage-slavery and the division of labour. In both cases, the word “neo-liberalism” stops us seeing the possibility of getting rid of wage-labour, as a mode of exploitation, or of the state.
And, much as the PS-PCF government in the early years of Francois Mitterrand’s presidency nationalised certain major industries and infrastructure in order to free up Capital, Sarkozy supports state intervention in the economy where needed:
In Sarkozy’s books and the programme of the UMP it is explicitly said that the state must play a greater role in technological innovation. Sarkozy emphasises that the American state finances innovation via military and space-programme research and via various federal interventions in the private sector, contrary to the official ‘neo-liberal’ ideology.
Hoping that the Socialist Party might take over the reins of government and implement this anti-working class offensive instead, or propagandising for the bourgeois state to run the economy without talking about workers’ management, is a feeble response to a government which wants to attack job stability, benefits and the right of workers to organise. It is a top down answer which makes no reference to workers’ independent political activity or their ability to control and run society.
Sarkozy’s attacks are very real and are contrived to emasculate the working class – but to respond with variants of liberal bourgeois republicanism or nostalgic French nationalism rather than positive agitation for working-class power means relegating socialist politics to the rank of abstract theory.
Certain activists have been keen to portray Sarkozy as a novel threat, whether that means using the catch-cry ‘Sarko-facho’ (‘Sarkozy-fascist’); portraying him as nothing but a lickspittle of George Bush; or, as the Iranian media now have it, a Mossad agent. Yet most of the French President’s pronouncements seem to be in tune with the anti-working class, conservative and authoritarian political tradition of General de Gaulle. We only have to think back to spring 2006 when the previous UMP [Gaullist] government attempted to introduce the CPE law to undermine young workers’ job stability, or 2005 when it backed the EU Constitution. The continuity in the history of the French right is examined in some detail in the latest issue of the Ni Patrie ni Frontières journal, which devotes some 62 pages to assessing the character of so-called ‘Sarkozyism’.
Sarkozy has taken on great personal power, setting great store by his own image and casting himself as somewhat of a national saviour, in the mould of de Gaulle or a Napoleon. But NPNF argues that the frivolous labelling of Sarkozy as some sort of ‘fascist’ – who thereby ought to be excluded from ‘normal’ politics – is to ignore the real threat he poses in common with any bourgeois government:
Rather than concentrating on his economic and social programme, strongly opposed to the interests of the working class, much of the anti-Sarkozy propaganda makes out that he is more than just an enemy of the working class. A monster.
The assertion that Sarkozy represents an ‘Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal’ current can also be misleading. True, the main thrust of his anti-trade union and privatising agenda is echoic of Margaret Thatcher (hence the nickname ‘Monsieur Thatcher’, a characterisation which he does not seem particularly keen to dispel). Yet the claim that he is not a normal French bourgeois politician, but really just a lackey of George Bush, seems just to reflect the myth of a ‘republican collective’ of ‘traditional’ political debate, counterposed to ‘outsider’ elements not native to French politics:
Most discussion of the alleged Atlanticism of the right has just one goal: reintroducing the age-old threats of the Foreign Party, or even Fifth Column (using chauvinist themes to silence opponents) and, as a result, embolden Gaullist myths. This idea is spouted by a united front running from the [liberal monthly] Monde diplomatique to the PCF [Communist Party] passing via the PS [Socialist Party] and a decent chunk of the UMP [Gaullists]. Ultimately these people want to exalt the “national fabric” of St. Louis, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle. All of them gargle about the “French mindset”, “French exception”, “French tradition” and other red herrings.
The history of the once million-strong Parti Communiste Francais is indicative here. After participating in the 1936-38 anti-fascist ‘Popular Front’ government of socialists and bourgeois liberals, Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez called upon ‘patriotic’ French far-right goons to join a ‘French front’ against Nazism, and himself joined the French army. After World War II the Communists served in a national unity government with Charles de Gaulle for two years, yet after 1958’s military coup in Algiers, which provoked the downfall of the Fourth Republic and a new administration headed by de Gaulle, he was himself termed a ‘fascist’. Throughout these episodes the rhetoric of ‘anti-fascism’ could be used to justify cross-class alliances, since it represented politics as a battle where ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘republican’ parties fought against ‘fascists’ rather than as a struggle between classes.
Indeed, nowadays crying ‘fascist’ in the face of Sarkozy’s attacks on the working class tends to imply support the opposition Socialist Party – a party with a limited base in the working class and no organic links to the labour movement - instead. Yet, as NPNF points out:
What Sarkozy said in his election campaign pushed the same buttons as Ségolène Royal, his rival in the presidential contest. Both played on the theme of “security”, both are opposed to open borders and free migration, both vaunted the merits of those who “work hard” and “get up early”, and both condemned May 1968, even if for marginally different reasons.
The PS and Royal herself have supported Sarkozy’s ‘modernisation’ agenda, only making the vaguest criticisms. Royal opposed the rail workers’ strike, excusing pensions cuts in much the same way as her British counterpart in Number Ten might. The students’ union UNEF, dominated by the PS, was consulted in the elaboration of Sarkozy’s university privatisation plan, and since then has done nothing to organise opposition. Royal like Sarkozy backs the riot cops in the suburbs, although no doubt could suggest a more ‘touchy-feely’ way of batting down the unemployed black youth. Such is the consensus among the capitalist class that Sarkozy was even able to persuade Bernard Kouchner, a leading figure in the PS, to serve as foreign minister in the UMP government. The parallels between Sarkozy’s fishing for ministers outside the UMP and Gordon Brown’s courting of Digby Jones, Tory MPs and Paddy Ashdown for his “government of all the talents” are clear.
Sarkozy’s individual ‘reforms’ are part of a general agenda of privatisation and casualisation of employment so that France can compete on the world stage, one inherited from his predecessors. There is no solace to be found in supporting liberals and right-wing ‘social democrats’ here, since they share these essential perspectives. But neither does capitalism run by the bourgeois state represent an alternative to the kind of economy that Nicolas Sarkozy and the soft-Gaullist “Socialist Party” alike wish to achieve. NPNF cuts sharply against those who respond to Sarkozy by harking back to the days when the French state had greater penetration in economic life:
What exactly does the word “neo-liberal” mean in a society where most of the means of production rest in private hands and yet the state is the largest employer and has for a long time planned the economy? Have people forgotten that de Gaulle, after 1946, launched an “economic recovery plan” and that from 1958 he used Three-Year Plans?
“Neo-liberalism” is a vague notion even among its supporters, never mind its confused opponents. On the right, it is used to criticise the state’s “redistributive” actions (which in fact consist of taxing single and healthy workers and those who have a fixed job and then giving the money to the unemployed, the ill and people with kids) except when they are in favour of the bosses (you’ve never seen a boss complain about getting a subsidy or an anti-working class law).
On the left and far left it is a means of demanding state control (full or partial) of Capital, without at all calling for the overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of hierarchy, money, wage-slavery and the division of labour. In both cases, the word “neo-liberalism” stops us seeing the possibility of getting rid of wage-labour, as a mode of exploitation, or of the state.
And, much as the PS-PCF government in the early years of Francois Mitterrand’s presidency nationalised certain major industries and infrastructure in order to free up Capital, Sarkozy supports state intervention in the economy where needed:
In Sarkozy’s books and the programme of the UMP it is explicitly said that the state must play a greater role in technological innovation. Sarkozy emphasises that the American state finances innovation via military and space-programme research and via various federal interventions in the private sector, contrary to the official ‘neo-liberal’ ideology.
Hoping that the Socialist Party might take over the reins of government and implement this anti-working class offensive instead, or propagandising for the bourgeois state to run the economy without talking about workers’ management, is a feeble response to a government which wants to attack job stability, benefits and the right of workers to organise. It is a top down answer which makes no reference to workers’ independent political activity or their ability to control and run society.
Sarkozy’s attacks are very real and are contrived to emasculate the working class – but to respond with variants of liberal bourgeois republicanism or nostalgic French nationalism rather than positive agitation for working-class power means relegating socialist politics to the rank of abstract theory.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Tuesday 20th, all out on strike and in the streets!
Convergences Révolutionnaires statement
It's in the name of "fairness" that Sarkozy, [Prime Minister] Fillon and their allies are waging the struggle against "special" pension deals. But no-one can help but notice that having voted through 15 billion euros' tax cuts for the rich and given himself a 206% pay (or is that pocket money?) rise, having ignored the fraudulent profits of his mate Lagardère who got rid of tens of thousands of jobs at Airbus, President Sarkozy and his government don't have anything much to do with "fairness". And it's a bit of a swindle when they tell us "work more to earn more!"
Train drivers, RATP [Paris transport network] workers, electricians and gas-workers don't need telling that Sarkozy wants them to work more and earn less. All other worker s understand that they are also in the firing line of this attack. Not only because after taking on "special deals" the government will mount a fresh fight against all pensions, demanding 41 or 42 years' worth of pension fund contributions - in fact cutting pensions. But also because this government is preparing new measures to make redundancies easier, push down salaries, cut unemployment benefits and attack free healthcare.
"Fairness" would be a return to 37 and a half years' worth of pension fund contributions, like before Balladur's private sector reforms. Why should it be that the huge economic growth of the last few decades is translated into the need to work for longer and the impoverishment of workers and retired people? How come bosses and shareholders can still get rich anyway?
"Fairness" would mean dividing up wealth differently, first off setting a minimum wage of 300 euros a week for everyone. That would just be to meet increases in the cost of living, which are felt particularly sharply in basic necessities like food, petrol, rent and bills. "Fairness" would mean banning lay-offs, in particular in enterprises which are making profits. It would mean getting rid of casual contracts.
All those taking strike action and demonstrating in the streets are right - it's the only way of stopping [Sarkozy] pressganging the whole working class into even deeper poverty.
The government would love to force the workers who were on strike in the days leading up to Tuesday [20th November] to give in. It fears that they will join up with public sector workers as well as a certain number in the private sector. It knows that if the movement broadens it will become an irresistable force and it will have to back down. So, all together now! Our future depends on it, as does that of our children - including many of the students fighting against the university reforms in order than education is not placed even more at the service of capital and even more unequal.
Sarkozy and his government hope, with the support of certain union leaders - who have until now done everything possible to keep the struggles separate - to avoid having to face a united movement. The Parti Socialiste politicians themselves want to stop the strikes. They support us no more than right-wingers do, and all of them proclaim that they would make the same "reforms", even if they say they'd use different methods to put them in place. But nothing proves that these stooges will be able to put the lid on the movement without cost. It's time for all the unions to follow the example of the rank-and-file train drivers who in their general assemblies last week showed that they would not bend down in front of anyone else's decisions. We can't count on anything but our struggle, and we must be in charge of it ourselves.
It's in the name of "fairness" that Sarkozy, [Prime Minister] Fillon and their allies are waging the struggle against "special" pension deals. But no-one can help but notice that having voted through 15 billion euros' tax cuts for the rich and given himself a 206% pay (or is that pocket money?) rise, having ignored the fraudulent profits of his mate Lagardère who got rid of tens of thousands of jobs at Airbus, President Sarkozy and his government don't have anything much to do with "fairness". And it's a bit of a swindle when they tell us "work more to earn more!"
Train drivers, RATP [Paris transport network] workers, electricians and gas-workers don't need telling that Sarkozy wants them to work more and earn less. All other worker s understand that they are also in the firing line of this attack. Not only because after taking on "special deals" the government will mount a fresh fight against all pensions, demanding 41 or 42 years' worth of pension fund contributions - in fact cutting pensions. But also because this government is preparing new measures to make redundancies easier, push down salaries, cut unemployment benefits and attack free healthcare.
"Fairness" would be a return to 37 and a half years' worth of pension fund contributions, like before Balladur's private sector reforms. Why should it be that the huge economic growth of the last few decades is translated into the need to work for longer and the impoverishment of workers and retired people? How come bosses and shareholders can still get rich anyway?
"Fairness" would mean dividing up wealth differently, first off setting a minimum wage of 300 euros a week for everyone. That would just be to meet increases in the cost of living, which are felt particularly sharply in basic necessities like food, petrol, rent and bills. "Fairness" would mean banning lay-offs, in particular in enterprises which are making profits. It would mean getting rid of casual contracts.
All those taking strike action and demonstrating in the streets are right - it's the only way of stopping [Sarkozy] pressganging the whole working class into even deeper poverty.
The government would love to force the workers who were on strike in the days leading up to Tuesday [20th November] to give in. It fears that they will join up with public sector workers as well as a certain number in the private sector. It knows that if the movement broadens it will become an irresistable force and it will have to back down. So, all together now! Our future depends on it, as does that of our children - including many of the students fighting against the university reforms in order than education is not placed even more at the service of capital and even more unequal.
Sarkozy and his government hope, with the support of certain union leaders - who have until now done everything possible to keep the struggles separate - to avoid having to face a united movement. The Parti Socialiste politicians themselves want to stop the strikes. They support us no more than right-wingers do, and all of them proclaim that they would make the same "reforms", even if they say they'd use different methods to put them in place. But nothing proves that these stooges will be able to put the lid on the movement without cost. It's time for all the unions to follow the example of the rank-and-file train drivers who in their general assemblies last week showed that they would not bend down in front of anyone else's decisions. We can't count on anything but our struggle, and we must be in charge of it ourselves.
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