The rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (1993)

From the February 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the majority of the world's people are to solve their basic problems of poverty, insecurity and general alienation, and achieve a society of equality, they will have to join together democratically, irrespective of nationality and so-called race, to bring it about.

One of their main tasks must he the elimination of national, ethnic and racial prejudices and hatreds. They will have to recognize their identity of interests.

Such recognition is not—and has never been—easy. Xenophobia, in varying degrees, has always existed within capitalist society. And racism, an ideology or system of beliefs which claims that one so-called race or ethnic group is inherently superior to another, has been a feature of our society for a very long time.

No-one needs reminding of the horrors of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s, for example.

Unfortunately, however, in recent times, particularly with the onset of economic recession and ever-increasing unemployment. ethnic and national hatreds have once again increased in many countries, often breaking out into bitter and bloody conflicts and civil wars. And in many countries. immigrant workers and. quite often, the children and even grandchildren of immigrants. have become scapegoats for economic ills, and have been erroneously blamed for causing unemployment or taking jobs and housing away from indigenous workers.

The flames of such conflicts and hatreds have, more often than not, been fanned by overtly Fascist and racist groups and parties; but also at times of economic recession and political crises, by mainstream, reformist parties of both left and right. 

France is a case in point.

Immigration

By the beginning of 1969. there were about three million immigrants in France, of whom two million were salaried workers. There were 700,000 Spaniards, 685,000 Italians and 300,000 Portuguese. Over the following ten years or so, most of these workers merged into the general working-class environment. And like the French, the majority are at least nominally Catholic. The situation with regard to the North Africans from Algeria. Morocco and Tunisia, has been, and still is, much different, as most are Moslems.

In the sixties, the governments of France, as in other Western European countries, together with many French employers, encouraged immigration. Indeed, immigrant labour was considered indispensable for the maintenance and development of activity in certain sectors of the economy, which at the time was booming. In April 1967, a report by the Office d'Immigration stated that:

immigration has contributed to getting our economy going and expanding. Jobs which no longer attract French people, or for which there were no applicants, have been taken up by foreigners without any difficulty arising among national workers.

Immigrant workers undertook the hardest, worst-paid, jobs, particularly in the car and building construction industries. As elsewhere, immigrants had to find, or accept, cheap apartments and houses near their places of work, which tended to become ghettoes, which in turn, placed a heavy burden on municipal schooling and some welfare facilities. This was considered acceptable at the time, though many French workers began to move out into the suburbs of the cities.

By 1975 the situation began to change. As in Britain and elsewhere, unemployment began, slowly at first, to increase. And French workers had to accept jobs they had hitherto refused. Often, they complained that immigrants had taken "their" jobs, as though the jobs were theirs by right. They also accused immigrant workers of taking their apartments—most of which were appalling slums, and didn't belong to the workers anyway.

So, by 1975, the French government, realizing that the "good times” of capitalist expansion were, at least for the foreseeable future, over, halted immigration. Shortly after, the government even offered the equivalent of £1,000 to any immigrant who volunteered to return to his or her country of origin. But there were few takers. Unemployment, particularly in Algeria, was (and still is) endemic. Even life in a Paris slum was preferable to an Algerian village or a worse slum in Algiers.

By the late 1970s. however, many immigrants began to be subjected to harassment. and worse. Surprisingly—or, perhaps, not—the first really nasty assault on immigrant workers was not organized by a far-right Fascist group, but by members and officials of the Parti Communiste Français, the French Communist Party. It was on Christmas Eve, 1980.

A hostel for 300 African workers from Mali had just been renovated in the Paris suburb of Vitry. an area with a Communist administration. The Communist mayor led a gang of PC heavies with a bulldozer and proceeded to smash the place up. making it uninhabitable. The doorways were blocked with earth, and the iron railings were torn up by the bulldozer. Gas, electricity and the central heating were cut off. The Communists had no intention of being outdone by the Fascists in pandering to the nationalist and racist prejudices of local French workers. Nor did the mayor intend to lose his job.

Far right

Following the upheavals of 1968 in France a number of small far-right groups began to emerge, such as the Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist and later the violent, hardline Nazi Fédération d'Action Nationale Européene (FANE), led by Marc Frederikson which has continued to exist under various names.

In Britain, the National Front was formed in 1967; in France, the Front National (FN) was not formed until 1972. Like the British NF, the French FN began life as an unholy mixture of hard-line Fascists, anti-immigrant racists and far-right conservatives, although unlike some of the pre-war far-right such as I'Action Française, the FN accepts the Republic and is not monarchist. It also attracted the support of many pieds noirs as former colonists from Algeria are known. The FN denies that it is a Fascist party, but it does display many of the trappings, symbols and attitudes of the pre-war Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot. Its undisputed leader is Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in a fisherman's cottage in the Brittany village of La Trinité-sur-Mer in 1928. His father was killed in the war, when his boat hit a German mine. As a student in Paris, in the 1950s, Le Pen was already a right-winger, leading gangs of students on demonstrations in the Latin Quarter against “commies” and “lefties”. After his student days, he briefly became a paratrooper, in the Foreign Legion, in Indo-China. Back in France, he became a supporter of Pierre Poujade's right-wing movement and, at 27, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as one of the movement's most turbulent deputies. He soon quarrelled with Poujade, however, and. tiring of parliament, enlisted in the French Army, and was sent to Algeria, where according to a police report he supervised the electric shock torture of at least one Algerian nationalist prisoner—which he denies (if Lieutenant Jean-Marie Le Pen didn't torture any Algerians, he must have been an exception to the rule!).

On his return to France, Le Pen again became involved in various small right-wing fringe groups, and subsequently lost an eye in a street brawl following a rally. For a number of years, he was regularly seen wearing a black eye patch, looking like a Hollywood pirate. After a while, he started up a small publishing business, but was later prosecuted, and fined, for “glorifying war crimes'' by selling a record album of Nazi songs. Jean-Marie Le Pen did, however, learn one lesson: he tried to keep within the law, and he tended to use innuendo rather than direct racist remarks. He was re-elected to parliament in 1958, as an independent, but lost his seat in 1962.

Soon after the formation of the Front National in 1972, the organization was rent by a number of violent internal feuds, and some of the hardline neo-Nazi elements broke way to form groups like FANE, leaving Le Pen in control. But he. his family, and his party were broke, and living on loans. Then, in 1976, fate was kind to Le Pen. Almost overnight he became a rich man.

On 25 September 1976, Hubert Lambert. a 42-year-old alcoholic and tranquillizer addict, who dreamed of becoming a Minister in a Front National government, died from cirrhosis of the liver. Le Pen eventually inherited a half of his £3 million fortune; and with his wife and his three daughters moved into the late millionaire's luxury villa in Saint Cloud. Le Pen dispensed with his black eye patch, and bought himself a brand new glass eye and some expensive suits. He also dyed his thinning, dark brown but greying, hair blond; and he acquired two black Dobermans.

Life for French, as well as Frances immigrant. workers was less satisfactory. And was to get worse. By 1980, ethnic tensions had increased considerably.

It was not until 1983 that FN electoral support began to take off, when a municipal by-election in Dreux. a town west of Paris where immigrants made up a quarter of the population, gave them four elected councillors with almost 27 percent of the vote. They had campaigned on a purely racist platform. In December Le Pen stood in a parliamentary by-election in the Brittany constituency of Morbihan. Although he received 50 percent of the vote in his home village of Trinité-sur-Mer, his overall vote was only 12 percent. Unlike in Dreux, he was not able to play the anti-immigrant card in Brittany.

In the 1984 elections to the European Parliament, the FN took 11 percent of the national vote and, as seats were allocated under a system of proportional representation, got 10 seats.

In the local, cantonal elections in March 1985, in which half the French electorate was eligible to vote, the Front National vote was only 8.7 percent nationally, although they increased their vote in the south of the country (to as much as 30.4 percent in Nice) and in some of the Paris suburbs. Nevertheless, in the first round the Front received one million votes. During and after the elections, there were a number of attacks on immigrants in both the south of the country, and in the Paris region. And throughout the year, racist and FN slogans could be seen all over Paris and the suburbs. Front slickers, “Votez Le Pen", were everywhere—and can still be seen in many places. Front National membership was almost 70,000. And increasing.

Le Pen now had a solid base for the General Election the following March. In the main, the Front's policies were, even by the usual standards of capitalist and reformist politics, vague yet populist. Except on immigration where, if anything, they had hardened, Front National policies had not changed much since 1978.

As a throwback to Poujadism, the FN called for “la liberté d’entreprendre” and opposition to the technocrats ”de la gauche". As an even farther throwback, to the wartime régime of Vichy, they called for measures to develop the family as the basic cell of French society. Resistance to "Marxism in our schools" was also high on the Front’s agenda. And another slogan during the election was: "Yes to work for young French people means No to immigration!". Always the main Front National slogan has been: "Lutter contre 1‘immigration”.

The Front entered the election with confidence. They considered the newly-introduced proportional representation to be in their favour. In the event, the FN received 2,705,838 votes, just on 10 percent of the votes cast. This gave them 34 members in the National Assembly (plus one sympathizer). And what a weird bunch many of the FN members of the National Assembly were! There was Edouard Dupont, aged 83, who had been an official in the collaborationist Vichy wartime government: there was former Captain Pierre Sergent. aged 60, who had led the OAS secret army in France, and had been condemned to death while on the run, but subsequently amnestied; there was Roland Gaucher, who had been a pro-Nazi youth leader during the German occupation. Another oddity was Pierre Ceyrac who, besides being a member of the Front National, was also a member of the Rev Moon's Unification Church. Ten other members had opposed Algerian independence. Six of them were lawyers, and one was a big landowner. All of them, however, pressed the new government of Jacques Chirac to set up a ministry to oversee the control, and deportation, of two million North African and black immigrants (this, presumably, included the children and even grandchildren of immigrants).

Meanwhile, racist gangs, including known FN members, as well as the police, continued to harass and physically attack immigrants or anyone with a “coloured” skin. At railway stations, and in suburban streets, police presence became ever more pervasive. Foreigners were sometimes held for days on end at police discretion and then secretly expelled from the country.

To be concluded. 

Peter E. Newell

American Noahs (1982)

TV Review from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those who keep lists of the terrors the future might bring (as if the suffering of the present were not enough), it seems a new prospect has arisen: nuclear war, followed by the survival only of some vicious Christians.

We live in a time of rapid social change; contradictions inherent in the present form of society make social revolution even more urgent. As in previous such periods of heightened class conflict and questioning of old prejudices, there is a polarisation of ideas. On the one hand, the force for creative production, democracy and the removal of the barrier of private property; and on the other, the desperate and conservative reaction against it. One manifestation of this desperation, the American Survivalists, was the subject of a documentary on BBC 1 on 29 June.

The Survivalist movement consists of some two million Americans who fear some impending disaster and are taking steps to arm themselves against this often vague threat. Generally higher-paid workers or capitalists — white, patriotic and Christian — they speak of the threat of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown, riots, marauders and the "coming hard times". What unites the Survivalists is the religious idea that the relations formed between humans in society are beyond our control. For them, war and conflict cannot be dealt with by conscious, democratic co-operation, but must be "accepted" and prepared for. Like CND, the Survivalists have not recognised that war and poverty are direct consequences of the capitalist social system, so that they struggle in vain with the effects while leaving the cause intact. Unlike CND, however, some Survivalists have a moral preference for, rather than against, nuclear war.

Kurt Saxon, for example, writer of many "survival" manuals, stated in an interview:

We have over eighty million social dependents and if I could press a button and they would all be gone, then everything gets straightened out; but I can't find the button . . . the culling is coming.

An army general who runs courses in self-defence and fire-arms use at 3000 dollars per course, spoke of the "have-nots preying on the haves":

Our country depends on individuals, and yet there are a lot of socialists, communists, all which I class as idiots . . . there are more idiots in the world than there are non-idiots.

How, then, do these people propose to survive the coming "hard times"? By asking why the interests of "haves" and "have-nots" do not harmonise, or considering the possibilites of human co-operation? No, as Christians they stand by the holy writ of Romans, chapter 13, and oppose socialism. One of their bookshops stocks a "source book" called How To Kill, Volumes 1-5. (What would happen of the imaginary assailant had also read this?) One isolated group of armed Christians hiding in the hills pray to "God" to teach them how to hate, and one of the fresh recruits told how his real fear was not so much of nuclear destruction, but of destruction of the nuclear family:

When homosexuality is on open view and not hidden anymore, you know it's getting bad. When witchcraft and communism is everywhere you know it's getting bad.

Survivalism has become a market with a turnover of billions of dollars. But this is clearly a reflection of the wider class divide between poverty and property, and of the increasing war and violence arising out of the development of world capitalism generally. One man had gone to live with just his immediate family, in total isolation. He was trying to cut himself off from the complications of life in modern America, and moaned that

The situation where people want things is happening now. If they can't get it one way or another they'll get it another way.

But there is no need to try to run way from living together as part of society, to become cut off from all of the potential benefits of modern technology. The power struggle between the two classes is inherent in capitalism, not in human society itself. Future society can function without classes and property. One of the instructors in the secret military training school for "survival" urged his pupils to remember that there had never been peace "since the world began" because people fight, for example, over jobs. But before the advent of private property people did live in peace, and the competitive struggle over jobs is itself an integral feature of the capitalist market system.

These Christians taking up arms against the "threat" of communism and chaos believe that "God" has called them together and that it is their duty to "survive", however many infidels they may have to kill. Such a philosophy might suit the last ruling class in history, threatened on its last legs by social sanity breaking out across the world. But in reality, as soon as a majority are willing democratically to reject class rule, all the guns and prayers in the world cannot hold them back.

Clifford Slapper

Terrorism and political violence (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become a commonplace to declare that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ But has violence ever been an effective political tool and, if so, is it still? The American ruling class has declared ‘war on terrorism’ in an attempt to legitimise their own use of political violence around the world. But both the US and their enemies are indulging in an identical activity. The question therefore arises as to whether humankind’s political problems are ever resolved through military conflict.

It is possible to trace the history of warfare back to the origins of private property in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant some 5,500 years ago. The initial raising of armies to defend the agricultural surplus from raiding nomads soon became used to attack other city-states. The once elected warlords evolved into permanent kings whose main role became the protection of their class’s power and wealth. The first imperial regimes emerged together with those who struggled against such oppressive empires. Those who opposed any established power regimes have been demonised by their enemies ever since. It is these ‘resistance’ movements who have used political violence (terrorism) in an attempt to destroy and replace existing (usually) imperial regimes. We will not discuss the historical logic of the violence between states but this is where the seeds of internal political conflict are invariably sown. That the subsequent ‘terrorists’ are almost always armed and trained by a state is well documented and  such regimes show staggering hypocrisy by demonising their own students when they turn on their teachers. History has given a very mixed reception (usually dependant on their success) to these heroes or criminals: Spartacists, Thugees, Dog Soldiers, Boxers, Mau-Mau, Assassins – the list is endless. Since violence was used to impose political regimes, many have concluded that it is only through such conflict that they can be destroyed. Before we attempt to analyse whether history backs up this logic let us take a detour to try and understand why our culture is so immersed in the cult of the warrior and the belief that violence can resolve human problems.

Ever since Homer’s tales of the heroic deeds of the Greeks at Troy western culture has been saturated with a military ethos. We cannot imagine Malory, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Fenimore Cooper without Lancelot, Macbeth, Don Quixote or Hawkeye. Such is the central place it occupies in our story-telling that we can hardly conceive of drama itself without a conflict of some kind within the narrative. As we have seen, the very origins of private property produced a warrior elite who subsequently became a ruling aristocracy and it this class who were the patrons of the creators of culture. Given the moral dualism of Christianity it was not difficult for the rulers to characterise their opposing city, or later, nation states as evil. War became described as a struggle between good and evil – the relevant designations were, of course, dependent on which side you were on.  After six millennia of warfare the idea that it still represents a way to resolve problems is still an insidious part of our culture – not because it has proven to be so but because the ruling classes need us to believe in it. As evidence for this, let us consider the outcome of the longest and most bloody conflict of the last century between two of Europe’s ruling classes – Britain and Germany.

It is still a matter of great debate who actually started the war of 1914-18; some say it was provoked by France to recover territory lost during the Franco-Prussian conflict whilst others believe it an inevitable consequence of Germany’s need for an empire. What is not disputable is that the opposing economic interests of the ruling classes concerned were vital in their decision to go to war. They utilised the martial cultural traditions of their nations to convince the populations to slaughter each other. History shows that nothing was resolved by the allied ‘victory’ of 1918 because, as a consequence of the imposed terms of the German surrender, the whole thing erupted again in 1939. Again millions died, but did the fighting end with the defeat of Nazism? The Russian Empire was formed out of the division of Europe after 1945, as was much of the ‘third world’ where they and the U.S. fought out the ‘cold war’. Even today we still endure the consequences of the two world wars where the victors redrew the world map according to their interests – Palestine, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, etc. All we can be say about the direct result of war is that the ruling class of one nation state replaces another. Clearly this is not why those who fought the war did so, thus we can say with some legitimacy that war has not resolved the problems it was (at least in propaganda terms) supposed to. Can we also make this claim for the results of terrorist campaigns?

Many leaders of movements for ‘national liberation’ (terrorists) have subsequently become part of the ruling class they once fought. Israel, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Northern Ireland and many others now enjoy the fruits of their murderous campaigns. But what has become of the promises made during the struggle? Most who killed and were killed did so in the belief that they were creating a better and more just society than the one they lived in. In cases such as Zimbabwe things seem to have become worse in some respects. The exploitation and murderous repression of the Palestinians has plunged Israel into a nightmare of endless violence. The Irish  ruling class seem incapable of resolving their internecine power struggle . So again it would appear that violence has failed to deliver a better life to those who indulged in it and suffered from it. Why? One obvious reason is the inability of humankind to learn from its history. An understanding of history is far and away the most important component of any political consciousness. Before any course of political action is undertaken we must make an effort to understand how the world came to be the way it is. A motorcar cannot be repaired without some knowledge of how it works and no amount of moral outrage and violent action will resolve the problem. War and its bastard progeny we call terrorism, together with the regimes both have brought into the world, are the problem and not the solution.

Socialists have always opposed both violent struggles for ‘national liberation’ and the ‘legitimate’ wars fought between nation states. We see that causing more of it cannot lead to an end to the suffering in the world. War and all organised violence can only be stopped when it is rejected by those who alone must fight it. The ruling class and their media, political ideology, establishment history and all the other paraphernalia of the capitalist propaganda machine can never acknowledge this because to do so would illegitemise the origins of their own power. As to the other myth they peddle concerning mankind’s inherent violence, we can only look within ourselves for the answer. If you sincerely believe in the efficacy of violence to solve your own and the world’s problems then you simply deny the evidence of history.

Andrew Westley