Saving what’s Left: Mélenchon bucks the trend? (2022)

Mélenchon in Toulouse

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent Presidential ballots in France have ended as everyone predicted they would do: in the second round run-off Emmanuel Macron clearly defeated Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing Rasssemblement Nationale (RN). Although Le Pen’s performance in the important pre-vote TV debate with Macron was not quite as bad as her efforts of five years ago, she remained incapable of countering Macron’s grasp of detail and his schoolboy enthusiasm for all things technical. The prior elimination of candidates representing what remains of the mainstream in French politics, made the electoral outcome horribly inevitable. Although Le Pen looked very confident about the effects of her rhetorical flourishes, her defeat represents the normal outcome of latter day Fifth Republican politics. Even if we take into account the seeming originality of Macron’s electoral majority formed around his République en March Party (LREM), it is still business as usual.

The LREM is a grouping of left and right politicians fleeing from the existing party structures; a kind of Blairite big-tent of perplexed opportunists and old sweats seeking a second youth. Its existence underlines the gradual shrinkage and fragmentation of the conventional republican centre right and a parallel demise of putatively socialist and communist parties. In reality, the supposedly left/right centre of Macronism only looks novel when contrasted with the continuing presence – indeed growth – of the party formerly led by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Her father set up the openly racist Front National (FN) to give vent to his visceral hatred of Arab immigrants, blacks and Jews. The space he created for this putrid style of politics opened the way for the somewhat less vociferous RN. A recent dalliance with respectability means that the RN remains largely bankrupt both in terms of ideas and in strictly financial terms.

Contemporary French politics, in fact, boils down to how the centre have used this extreme right excrescence to their own advantage. For conventional parties, the fact that the FN/RN persistently falls at the last hurdle of the presidential run-off is all to the good: its existence creates a feedback loop which unfailingly returns the system to its original (centrist) point of departure. This is especially true when a particularly close result provides a frisson of excitement in an otherwise stagnant body politic. This strange situation is partly due to the fact that de Gaulle’s plebiscitary monarchy established in the 1950s was designed for stability. Under its umbrella voters are gently enjoined to vote for the least-worst candidate in the two-person run-off. To begin with, the perversity of the system was hardly visible: tailor-made for the grand Charles, it offered little scope for competitors. But with some tweaking it could be made to work for politicians who lacked the general’s post-war charisma. The needed refinement was introduced by Mitterrand who – working in cahoots with Chirac – introduced dodgy reforms to the electoral system in order to maintain the FN as a looming death-star aimed at the centre of the universe. So it is that with national service long gone, the militaristic superb of the General has given way to the charmless style of one Emmanuel Macron who came to power from the élite schools and the banking sector. He is hardly a hero of the resistance. But the message for conventional politicians is clear: cynics, nincompoops and technocrats can sneak into power simply on the back of the presence of an ageing cohort of scruffy xenophobes. What a system! But it is one which has been used equally by Chirac, Sarkozy and Francois Hollande.

Scarecrows

The Le Pen clan then, father and daughter, have operated as scarecrows – répoussoirs – who make the centre position preferable. The result, over time, has been the creation of an inward-looking political caste of untouchable top-level functionaries and corporate tycoons linked at the hip by the spinning of the revolving door leading from public sector to financial opulence. The ‘Caste’ – the title of a recent book – try to hold both ends of the political spectrum. This creates a kind of see-saw arrangement where no one is really happy to make the first risky move away from the centre. The only perspective is found in the rear-view mirror: for example, wannabe presidential candidates like to imitate the distinctive gestures of the grand Charles in the hope of squatting the comfortable middle-ground. This was easy enough for Mitterrand (who famously once denounced the system as a permanent coup-d’état), easy for Chirac but far more difficult for the twitchy and corrupt Sarkozy who in another life was a slick corporate lawyer. Macron’s youth gave him something of a Kennedy style which he used to pull off this scam. But his later success is more of a homage to the working of the system than it is to his tactical perspicacity. In reality Macron is an accident-prone youngster who believes in his own propaganda (‘France, the start-up nation’ was one of his slogans).

Can Mélenchon Save the Left?

Now we are in the run up to the elections to the legislature. This is where things could get interesting. The novelty here is the presence of Jean Luc Mélenchon’s, France Insoumise Party: France Unbowed (what a horrible name!). JLM is a politician who started his political career in the early Mitterrand days when the left adopted reforms meant to be of benefit to ordinary people. These included the lowering of the retirement age to 60, longer holidays, the strengthening of protective labour law, a shortened working week and more statutory rights for part-time workers. In these years JLM was a senator, a professional politician unfazed by Mitterrand’s shift to the right. But he gradually moved away from the French Socialist Party as it adopted policies which put into question many of its more popular reforms. In the end, he established his own small grouping under various guises and enjoyed some moderate success as a gadfly working against a hostile political environment.

He owes his credibility on the left to his unflagging support for popular causes, his vocal anti-racism, and his genuine talent as an orator. He has correctly diagnosed the stagnation induced by the Fifth Republic and proposes a referendum to revive the legislature by switching away from the existing constitution. The constitution tends to favour the rubber-stamping of decisions made by technocrats and applied by presidential fiat. But he was narrowly defeated in the first round of the last two presidential elections partly because of his inability to handle a hostile media. Nonetheless he has a small active group in the Chambre de Deputés, support in the working-class suburbs and a growing influence outside the metropolis.

Things are now working in his favour. The mainstream Socialist Party’s presidential candidate Hidalgo harvested a catastrophically low score in the election (1.7%) and lost her deposit. Similarly low scores were recorded by the Communist Party. The unbelievably uncharismatic leader of the ecologists, Jadot, and other left parties, picked up a few crumbs. For ordinary voters, the left is weak and divided and the political centre of gravity is pulling towards the right. The Socialist Party is suffering from the legacy of weakness and a lengthening series of betrayals. Conventional politicians are now seriously working out how to the raise the retirement age back to 65 and legislation to weaken protective labour law has been adopted largely thanks to François Hollande’s government. So people are looking elsewhere.

At the time of writing, Mélenchon is trying to get the left to unite around a loose coalition under the clumsy acronym of NUPES. This means getting most of the left into his improbable and leaky lifeboat: a coalition of the communists, socialists, and ecologists. So far JLM has managed to neutralise the spoiling tactics of the various party leaders and complacent party hacks. The brutal fact is the left has nowhere else to go. The left coalition will be up against a macrocosm of centrist opportunists and neo-liberals, a deeply divided republican right and the inevitable presence of the spectre on the extreme right. It will be a bumpy ride but things could work out better for him this time. JLM is an unlikely candidate for the supreme office and one who openly dislikes this presidential system. But so far he has managed to pull off an impossible movement towards the union of the left in a very hostile environment. This should give the centre some reason to be afraid. For it could spell the end of the terrible legacy of de Gaulle. Whether Mélenchon is willing to shake off the darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy is another matter.

M.M., 

Paris.

Political Notes: Another wasted Irish martyr (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another wasted Irish martyr

It is usual for IRA activists to be condemned by their opponents as cowardly thugs but that description could hardly be applied to the hunger strikers so the media hacks had to search for other words. They were not very successful.

Their confidence may have got the boost it needed, as Bobby Sands lay dying, from the' appeal by Northern Ireland Secretary Humphrey Atkins for, people not to heed lies and rumours but to pay attention to local councillors and clergymen and to “monitor the media".

The idea that local politicians and priests can be relied on to tell the truth is simply ludicrous, since if they did so they would drop out of capitalist politics and stop peddling religious nonsense.

All of these deal, in either side of the conflict, in the basic absurdity that the troubles in Ireland stem from religious differences. Such bigotries may inspire some of the nastier violence, and give fuel to the more extreme incitement by self-seeking politicians. This may make the bigotries appear as the cause of the problems when in fact they are part of the symptoms.

For Ireland is split, like any other of the artificial divisions in capitalist society, on lines of clashing economic interests. The incidental political and religious-theories simply bedevil and aggravate the problem, which will not be permanently resolved short of abolishing its cause — the private properly basis of capitalist society.

The hunger strikers were undoubtedly brave and steadfast literally unto death. Their martyrdom—for such was the object of their fast—obscured the essential fact that they were also tragic men. For their courage and steadfastness were applied in the interests of one side in a struggle in which they, as members of the working class, had no interests.

So the tragedy was that, having so much to give, they were content to give it only to be wasted.

Pay out at the bank

Among the many betes noires which torment the repose of all crusading lefties one of the blackest and most beastly is Barclays Bank.

The reason, as is well known to all cheque book holders, is that Barclays have a lot of investments in South Africa, whose racist oppression rouses those same lefties to a frenzy of protest no less intense for being discriminatory in its target.

This has reached the point when Barclay's Annual General Meeting is a sort of day out for the protesters who, perhaps because it is after all one of the Big Five Banks, usually include some expensively trendy lefties.

This year, for example, there was ravishing actress Julie Christie, indignantly bobbing golden curls in attack on the policies of the South African government. Possibly she is the trendiest — certainly she is among the most attractive of the protesters so far. At all events something persuaded the Bank to stop stone walling for a change and guardedly agree with some of the criticisms.

Retiring Barclays chairman Anthony Tuke did this, however, with some spirit, pointing out that about 300 other British companies also operate in South Africa and that one of Barclay’s first objects is to promote the exports of British capitalism td that country.

Now this was pretty shrewd of him, because British exports are dear to the heart of all British lefties as they are supposed to provide jobs for British workers (even if at the cost of jobs to other workers abroad  — perhaps in South Africa).

Barclays invest in South Africa for the same reason as all other capitalist concerns invest anywhere — to promote the process of profit making, which means the process of working class exploitation. As long as the government takes care of that aspect, the concerns need not worry too much about its other policies, however brutal and repressive they may be.

That is a fact of capitalist life—and such facts are habitually not easily absorbed by lefties who prefer publicity worthy demonstrations to effective remedies.

French lesson

The victory of Mitterand in the French Presidential election was another self-inflicted defeat for the working class.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider some of the utterances, before and after the result, by the two candidates. First Giscard, speaking just before the vote at that infamous World War 1 charnel house Verdun, asserted that of all the candidates only he had been in the army when the war in Europe ended in May 1945. As if being a soldier in a war necessarily makes a person a more desirable president. As if patriotism is a tenable, useful principle instead of a baseless and anti social fallacy. In any case Giscard was telling less than the truth, since his time in the army (as if it mattered) was actually less than that of Mitterand, who spent much of the war as a prisoner.

Mitterand had his own lies to tell. "It was a victory for youth, labour, creativity and renewal and will set off an enormous national upsurge” he exulted, too carefree — like his jubilant supporters in the streets — to recall the innumerable similar claims made by other victors before him, all of them discredited.

This mixture of deception and empty promises is fairly representative of the standard of debate in capitalism’s elections. Its object is not to encourage knowledge and participation but to ensure ignorance and apathy. Tragically, the working class swallow this muck and cast their vote in accordance with it.

When will they weary of this insulting, degrading, self-destructive process? When will they grasp the fact that they are the people who conceive, design and produce everything in society but allow themselves to be conned out of taking possession of it?

This is the measure of the defeats the workers inflict on themselves when they wastc their votes at election time by giving them for the continuance of capitalism. At such times they could resolve that capitalism shall be brought to an immediate end. But in France, as elsewhere, the message is that the deceit is still regarded as palatable and so capitalism grinds on.

Editorial: Discontented workers choose the devil they know (2022)

Editorial from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2022 French presidential election took place against the backdrop of deep working-class dissatisfaction with the political status quo. As in 2017, the first round of results gave French workers the choice between Emmanuel Macron and the far-right nationalist, Marine Le Pen in the second round. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing reformer, came in a close third at 22 percent of the votes cast (Le Pen came in second at 23 percent and Macron on top at 28 percent). What is striking is how the established capitalist parties, Les Républicains and so-called Parti Socialiste, were reduced to insignificance electorally, gaining between them about 6.5 percent of the vote less than the total cast for Eric Zemmour, the other far-right candidate at 7.1 percent. There were six other candidates.

Macron is no longer the new kid on the block. He has been the President for the last five years and has revealed himself as the faithful servant of French capitalism. In this time, he has introduced anti-working class austerity policies which provoked strikes and protests from the workers and also the Gilets jaunes protests which, although small-business led, had drawn in discontented workers. No wonder he is known as the ‘president of the rich’.

Le Pen continues in her attempt to make her party less toxic. She has changed its name to the Rassemblement National (National Rally) and has dropped her opposition to the EU and the Euro. She wants to reform it and reduce France’s contribution to the EU budget. French law would take precedence over EU law. For all her efforts to soften her party’s image, there are still her noxious xenophobic and racist policies – French nationals given priority over immigrants in jobs, housing and social services and tougher immigration policies and the banning of Muslim headscarves in public. She was helped by the fact that her rival on the far right, Zemmour, who is more obnoxious than she, is had helped her to appear more ‘moderate’. She poses as the workers’ friend by focussing on the cost-of-living crisis, with pledges like abolishing income tax for the under-thirties. However, she has had to play down her former close links with Putin by condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and faced taunts that her party had accepted loans from Russian banks.

It is not surprising that there is little enthusiasm for either of these candidates. Both Macron and Le Pen had gone after the votes that went to Mélenchon. Macron had sold himself to younger voters as a keen supporter of a pro-environment agenda.

After the second round of voting on 24 April, Emmanuel Macron was declared the final winner. Many French workers stayed with the devil they knew. Although profoundly dissatisfied with his political leadership, they reckoned that the alternative was far too unpalatable and decided to hold their noses and vote for him. There will be a sigh of relief among the world’s capitalists, especially those from the EU area, that the French workers had opted for a safe pair of hands. However for the French workers, there is little change, the same old drudgery and the struggle to make ends meet, which is the fate of workers all over the world.

France: No Socialist President (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

   Despite what the media said, France has not elected a “Socialist President”.

What did happen on 6 May was that a member of the so-called “Parti socialiste” (PS), which is not a socialist party but a party of capitalist reform similar to the Labour Party in Britain, won the presidential election there.

François Hollande finished top in the first round of the election in April, but as he polled less than 50 percent a second round took place in which he beat the outgoing President, Nicholas Sarkozy. In the first round 6.4 million (18 percent) voted for Marine Le Pen of the National Front and a further 4 million (11 percent) for Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front.  This means that some 30 percent voted for isolationist nationalism. It seems that the history of the 1930s may be beginning to repeat itself.

Mélenchon, a one-time PS minister (and a former Trotskyist – of course), left the PS in 2008 to form the Left Party. He has been seen as more “socialist” than Hollande but the Guardian came up with some more accurate descriptions. Seamus Milne (3 April) described him as a “radical left populist” (comparing him to George Galloway) while for Philippe Marlière (19 April) he was a “radical reformist”. He certainly employed a more anti-capitalist rhetoric but, while he is opposed to “neo-liberal”, corporate capitalism, what he stood for was an isolationist, state-capitalist France.

Record of failure

The PS was formed in 1971 as a result of the merger of the old, reformist SFIO (which, believe it or not, was the French for “French Section of the Workers’ International”) and various other groupings, under the leadership of François Mitterrand, who was to be elected President of France ten years later.

In its founding declaration, the PS proclaimed its equivalent to Labour Party’s former Clause IV:

  “Socialism fixes its object as the common good not private profit. Progressive socialisation of the means of investment, production and exchange constitute the indispensable basis for this”.

It went on:

 “The socialist transformation cannot be the natural product of reforms correcting the effects of capitalism. It is not a question of re-arranging a system, but of substituting another one for it.”

This was just rhetoric. When Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981 he made it quite clear that he had not been elected to bring about a change of system, but only to bring about a change in the existing system. It was the same distinction that had been made by the pre-war SFIO Prime Minister of the Popular Front, Léon Blum, between “the conquest of power” (for socialism) and “the exercise of power” (within capitalism).

Like François Hollande, Mitterrand promised “growth”. His government immediately drew up a plan to reduce unemployment by growing the economy 3 percent a year through increasing both popular consumption and government investment. The government did increase the minimum wage and benefits and it did employ more people as well as nationalising the banks, but the economy didn’t grow by 3 percent.

Instead, the workings of capitalism forced the government to devalue the franc three times within two years, the first as early as October 1981 (Mitterrand had only been elected in May of that year). A second followed in June of the following year. The third, in March 1983, was accompanied by a programme of austerity which clawed back the increase in wages and benefits introduced in May and June 1981. (For those who can read French, there’s description of what happened and why here: http://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/frechec.htm )

In short, the Mitterrand government’s attempt to grow the economy by increasing government and popular spending failed miserably. It failed because governments can’t control the way the capitalist economy works. It’s rather the other way round:  the workings of the capitalist economy oblige all governments, whatever their original intention and whatever they might prefer to do, to give priority to profits and the conditions for profit-making. In a slump such as today, this means imposing austerity, as President Hollande will find out, despite the fact that the people of France have just voted against it – yet another demonstration of how the workings of capitalism frustrate what people want.

Bid to reform capitalism

Like Mitterrand before him, Hollande only wants to “exercise power” within the context of capitalism and its rule of “no profit, no growth”. On a visit to London in February he blamed financial deregulation for the crisis and said this needed to be reversed. Ed Miliband, who was with him, chipped in:

 “We need to reform the way finance works and to reform the way that capitalism works. He is absolutely right” (Times, 1 March).

It’s clear, then, that Hollande wants to try to reform “the way that capitalism works”. He has set himself an impossible task. We can predict here and now that he won’t succeed in making capitalism work in the general interest, and that, like the last so-called “Socialist” President of France thirty years ago, he will fall flat on his face.  He will then have to pick himself up and accept the economic realities of capitalism and keep austerity to facilitate profit-making. TINAUC. There is no alternative under capitalism.

Adam Buick

French Presidential Elections: Capitalism Wins (2017)

From the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

There were eleven candidates standing in the first round of the French Presidential Elections on 23 April, a mishmash of left and right-wing populists and establishment parties, ranging from  the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle), the nationalist and anti-US Union Populaire Républicaine (Popular Republic Union), the Gaullist Debout La France (Stand Up France) which is anti-EU, the New Anti-Capitalist Party headed by a Ford factory worker, and Jacques Cheminade, a follower of the American conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche. As no candidate secured more than 50 percent of the votes  (in fact no candidate obtained more than 25 percent) the contest is  going to a second round on 7 May.

What marked this election out from the others is that  the main front runners were outsiders – Marine Le Pen of the Front National, Emmanuel Macron with his new movement En Marche (On the Go) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the so-called hard Left  candidate.  What is also unprecedented is that, due to the deep unpopularity of his government, François Hollande, decided not to stand again.  Working class people are angry that  their living standards are stagnating and what they see as an indifferent and out of touch political elite.  Unemployment is running at 10 percent (about 25 percent among 18 to 25 year-olds) of the workforce  amidst a slow recovery from the 2008/2009 recession. Moreover, many are dissatisfied with the government's response to the recent terrorist incidents and there are concerns about immigration. This is not unique to France. We have seen how working class discontent has played a part in the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency and in the vote for  Brexit in the UK.

Because of the Hollande's failure to resolve the social and economic problems of  French capitalism, 'Socialist' Party members opted for Benoît Hamon, the more radical left winger, to be their party's candidate. His platform included a basic universal income, a tax on robots to pay for the retraining of workers that they replace, a tax on banks' 'super profits', raising the minimum wage. However, he only got a humiliating 6 percent of the vote.

Marine Le Pen worked tirelessly to rebrand the  Front National  as being more of  a patriotic party than a fascistic one, with having the same appeal as UKIP has in the United Kingdom, and even went as far as kicking her father out of the organisation. However, this has not precluded her from putting forward xenophobic proposals, such as giving priority to French nationals over non-nationals over jobs, houses and welfare and placing new restrictions on immigration. She is attempting to court the working class vote by promising to reduce the retirement age from 62 to 60 and reduce income tax for the lowest earners. She is anti-EU and  pledges to renegotiate the terms of EU membership and hold a referendum on whether to leave the EU.  A win for her could jeopardise the future of the EU and thus create instability within world markets.

François Fillon of the Les Républicains party was the favourite until he became embroiled in a financial scandal involving alleged payments to his wife for fake jobs. He was standing on a platform of austerity, pledging to reduce public spending and cut a half million public sector jobs. He wanted to increase the working week for some public sector employees, scrap the wealth tax, reduce corporation tax , raise the retirement age to 65, put a cap on unemployment benefits.

Now the favourite, Emmanuel Macron, who finished  top in the first round, is a former investment banker and economy minister in François Hollande's government. He claims that to be revolutionising French politics, but what he is proposing is pretty standard capitalist fare  – lower corporation tax, extending the working week for younger workers, reduce public spending by cutting 120,000 public sector jobs by 2022.  He is pro-EU and says he is in favour of a more open France which accommodates cultural and ethnic diversity.

Chavez-admirer Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was backed by the 'Communist' Party, did surprisingly well with nearly a fifth of the votes, catching up in the polls and challenging the other front runners. His programme included reducing the working week to 32 hours, increasing the minimum wage and social security, raising taxes on the highest earners, re-negotiate the EU treaties. Like Le Pen, he pledged to reduce the retirement age to 60. That some of his policies were similar to those of the Front National is no accident. Both he and Le Pen were trying to woo the so-called 'left behinds',  workers who have seen the demand for their skills eroded and their livelihoods disappear with the economic and technological changes of world capitalism.

We predict with confidence that, whatever the outcome in the second round, Macron is the favourite, but Hillary Clinton was  the favourite to win last year's US presidential and the pundits expected the remain side to win last year's EU referendum.  However, we can predict with confidence who the losers will be and that will be the working class. For all their differences and grand promises, none of the candidates, including the two who went through to the second round,  challenged the capitalist system, that is the private and state ownership of the means of production and production for profit,  they seek only to modify it.  Once  Whoever is elected, their priority would have to be to ensure that French capitalism is competitive and profitable, and if, under certain conditions, this requires that social provisions are cut and workers are laid off, then so be it. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

Oliver Bond

Trotskyist vote in perspective (1969)

Alain Krivine, 1969.

From the August 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

“France — 200,000 vote for workers’ control”, declared Socialist Worker (June 5) reporting the presidential election results. "235,000 Say Revolution Now” was how Black Dwarf (June 14) put it.

Alain Krivine, the trotskyist candidate, had polled 236,263 votes in metropolitan France—a mere one per cent. Despite the fact that this confirmed our analysis of the May events—that a revolutionary situation did not exist because very few French workers really understood and wanted Socialism —the British trotskyist papers were exhilarated by the result:

. . .  the people who voted for Krivine can stand up and be counted for what they really are: men and women who have made a complete break with all the parliamentary parties, with their illusions of creeping socialism or bourgeois concepts of law and order. To vote for Krivine signifies an awareness of the necessity for revolution in France and a willingness to work for it. There are in Metropolitan France 235,000 revolutionaries who voted for a Trotskyist candidate and double that number if the disenfranchised foreigners, younger students, workers, and school children are included (Black Dwarf) 

Only Krivine stood for the abolition of the sham system of parliamentary democracy, for workers’ power as the alternative to capitalism . . . The campaign was a tremendous opportunity for using the machinery of the capitalist state in order to expose it. Krivine appeared on television with as much time as every other candidate—and hammered the need for revolution. His election address was delivered to every voter at the state’s expense (Socialist Worker)

We are sorry to dampen their ardour but let us put the whole thing in perspective. The vote for ‘workers’ control’ and for ‘revolution’ was minimal. Krivine polled about the same percentage as SPGB candidates have consistently done in national and local elections here. In addition, it has been our experience that on so low a percentage vote more than half our votes were cast by chance or in error so that the total vote cannot be regarded as an accurate measure of the real support for Socialism.

When in 1967 we contested four boroughs in the Greater London Council elections, putting up 14 candidates, the votes and percentages (taking those for the top candidate of each party) were:

Conservative             166,358     52.1
Labour                       120,735    37.7
Liberal                         18,033      5.6
Communist                    7,847      2.4
Socialist                         4,796      1.5
Others                            2,164      0.7

(At this time the trotskyist vote was included in that for the Labour Party.)

Lutte Ouvrière: Workers Struggling for What? (1969)

From the October 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many ideas which are basic to Socialism are accepted among far wider circles than the ranks of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Indeed there are many organisations throughout the world which would appear to endorse whole areas of the socialist case. These groups (who often tell us that ‘we are all socialists’) would generally argue that our aims are identical and that it is only on the question of means to achieve the ultimate socialist society that we differ. One such case is Lutte Ouvrière — a group based in France which, on the face of it, appears to share many of our ideas. Their programme socialiste (Lutte Ouvrière — June) correctly summarises the principal features of capitalism:

. . .  the capitalist system, based on the private ownership of the means of production, organises production for profit, without caring about the real needs of men, but on the contrary subjecting man completely to the needs of profit.

and points out why Socialism has become possible and how it will differ from capitalism:

. . . with the development of technology and science it is possible to give to all men a decent standard of living under conditions of total liberty . . . What stands between us and socialism is not scarcity of technical resources but simply the political system (des entraves politiques) which throws the economy into anarchic production, full of contradictions and resulting in insecurity, the destruction of wealth and the alienation of liberty.

But between Socialism and capitalism, argues Lutte Ouvrière, there must be a transition period during which the workers’ state will have a double goal: “to raise individual salaries (as long as the wages system lasts) but above all to develop free and collective facilities (housing, transport, education, public health, sport, leisure, etc.)." This, of course, is merely a rehash of the old Bolshevik maxim that “an epoch of proletarian dictatorship must inevitably intervene between a capitalist and a communist society.” The twin tasks of this transition period or ’dictatorship of the proletariat', said the Bolsheviks, were to boost production through industrialisation and above all to crush the “resistance of the sometime capitalists, landlords, bankers, generals, and bishops. . .” This is obviously a perspective shared by Lutte Ouvrière since they write that workers’ power will involve such measures as an “embargo on the banks, the finance societies, the insurance companies . . .”

To the Socialist Party this seems a completely false assessment of the problems that will face a socialist working class. With Marx we recognise that one of the first priorities for society after a victorious socialist revolution will be to develop rapidly the forces of production. But with Marx too we also understand that this will be achieved within the framework of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production—in other words within the framework of the moneyless, wageless society of Socialism. This is not the ‘transition period’ but a stage in the development of socialism itself. Hence Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he partially deals with this question, refers not to a ‘transition period' but to different phases in a communist (or socialist) society. And, of course, the idea of the workers applying terror during an entire ‘epoch’ to “sometime capitalists, landlords, bankers, generals, and bishops . . .”, which is central to Bolshevik thinking, becomes ludicrous when it is set against the Marxist concept of a democratic revolution by a majority of conscious socialists. We cannot say how fierce the struggles will be at the time of the socialist revolution but it should be clear that once the capitalist class has been stripped of its wealth it will certainly pose no kind of threat to “the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” (The Communist Manifesto). It is the Bolshevik fetish of leadership which still makes groups like Lutte Ouvrière cling to their ideas of a ‘transition period’. In the Bolshevik plan of things one minority, the ‘revolutionary vanguard’, holds down other minorities, such as the former ruling class, while the workers are attaining consciousness. The whole scheme might have some slight merit as a rather ingenious fairy tale except that it has always masked the rise to power of a new ruling class.

Lutte Ouvrière are also deeply influenced by Boshevism in their attitude towards parliament. Elections are a ‘masquerade’:

  A masquerade first of all in the goal which is given to them. To elect for seven years a president of the Republic . . .  is no more nor less than choosing the man who for seven years will have the right to send the CRS and the police forces against struggling workers and peasants, against demonstrating lycéens or students.
   . . . They ask the elector to put his trust for seven years in a man who for one month will have come out with beautiful promises as bait, but who once he is elected, will not have to answer to anyone.

Obviously, many of the points made here are valid — but how they can lead Lutte Ouvrière to the conclusion that elections are a masquerade is beyond us. When a capitalist party gains a majority in the national assembly or when a capitalist candidate is elected as president, this indicates that a majority of workers look upon the capitalist system as the only practical method of organising society. This was well illustrated in the presidential elections in France recently when the vast majority of working men and women voted for one or other of the capitalist contenders. Behind the ‘masquerade’ of the millions of votes for Pompidou, Poher, Duclos etc. stood a working class committed to capitalism.

But Lutte Ouvrière claim that this election was different from others because a ‘revolutionary' candidate (the trotskyist Alain Krivine) was standing.

  It is in this sense that the elections are a barometer. That Krivine should obtain 20, 300, 10,000, or 50,000 votes is not a matter of indifference. His score will permit us to estimate approximately the influence of left ideas among the population . . . the trotskyist candidature allows revolutionaries to count themselves . . .

Once again there are valid points here. A revolutionary candidate is useful as a thermometer of support for Socialism — but, as the Socialist Party has always emphasised, this is only achieved if he runs on an exclusively socialist ticket. A reform programme, such as Krivine embraced and which caused Lutte Ouvrière to support him, defeats the object of the whole exercise. Our criticism of Krivine’s programme is well summed up by this passage from Le Prolétaire (Programme Communiste):

  The ‘socialism' of the trotskyists does not cause the economic categories of capitalism to disappear: the wage slave remains a wage slave, the product remains a commodity. Nothing is changed . . . Mr Krivine and his friends then have nothing in common with the historical programme of the proletariat, nor as a result with the struggle of the working class and the revolutionary and scientific socialism of Marx and Engels.

Another hangover from the bourgeois ideology of Bolshevism in the programme socialiste of Lutte Ouvrière is their idea that the socialist revolution will be essentially a national affair, the workers gaining power country by country.

  The workers’ power will maintain economic and political relations with other countries by giving in the first place its support to the exploited of these countries.

It seems that they seriously imagine that Socialism will be achieved in France while Britain and Germany, or America and Russia, or Japan and China remain gripped by capitalism. But ideas today are international. When a group like Sheng Wu Lien in China points out that China is a capitalist country and explains that the so-called cultural revolution has merely enabled the ‘red capitalists’ led by Mao to tighten their hold on the means of production, they are talking a language which radicals in every continent can understand. Or when a tin-pot capitalist revolution on a small island in the Caribbean led by unoriginal political thinkers like Castro and Guevara is successful, its repercussions echo round the world. So Lutte Ouvrière should ask themselves what would be the likely effects on the world working class of a mass socialist movement starting to appear in any one country. The Socialist Party of Great Britain suggests that by the time the workers in France or anywhere else are turning to Socialism and preparing to take power they will be doing the same in every other advanced industrial country. World Socialism will be the outcome of a world socialist revolution..

It is on these grounds that the Socialist Party urges the members of Lutte Ouvrière and the many groups like it to examine their strategy and tactics. Like them we think that “world communism which will co-ordinate in a harmonious fashion the sum total of human activities yet also protect the peculiarities and customs of each section of the population” is an aim worth struggling for. But the Socialist Party also maintains that means and ends are indissolubly linked. A world socialist community can only be achieved by a majority of conscious socialists capturing political power in order to reorganise society on a basis of common ownership and democratic control. Attempts to apply Bolshevik or syndicalist techniques to the struggle for Socialism are self-defeating because inevitably such means cause those who use them to arrive at a different end from Socialism.

John Crump

Mitterrand wins again (1988)

From the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last time Mitterrand won, in 1981, there was dancing in the streets. Not as much, it is true, as in Bastia when their team won the cup but there was still some popular expression of hope that things were going to get better. This time there were some celebrations but only by party workers without any spontaneous popular participation as all illusions on this score had been shattered by the failure of the left-wing government that ruled France from 1981 to 1986, with, until 1984, the participation of Ministers from the French Communist Party (PCF).

This Government had tried to reduce unemployment and end the economic crisis by a policy of what it called "increasing popular consumption" which involved giving people more to spend by increasing social benefits. The gains people got from this, however, proved to be very temporary as within a year a balance of payments crisis developed and the franc had to be devalued. As a matter of fact the franc had to be devalued three times, and each time the Government had to back-track, slashing benefits and freezing wages. In the meantime unemployment continued to rise uncontrollably. As a result, in the 1986 general election, the left-wing Government was kicked out and replaced by a conservative one under Jacques Chirac, the leader of the Gaullist RPR party.

There then began a peculiar political experiment known as "cohabitation": a left-wing president working with a conservative prime minister. Actually, this arrangement wasn't as peculiar as all that since Mitterrand and Chirac were both equally solidly committed to maintaining capitalism and so there was no reason at all why they should not collaborate to run the political affairs of French capitalism. If the result of the election is anything to go by, French electors even prefer this arrangement, especially as they suspect that to give Chirac and the RPR a monopoly of power would lead to a resurrection of the Gaullist practice of filling the top posts in the civil service, courts and nationalised industries with party hacks.

To tell the truth, it was the first round of the elections at the end of April that was the more interesting. Not the campaign itself in which the three leading candidates Mitterrand, Chirac and another former prime minister, Barre, employed political techniques pioneered by Hitler and Mussolini to project themselves: mass rallies with music, rhythmic clapping and spotlights. It is hard to believe that the candidates who were the subject of this treatment were not slightly deranged in so obviously enjoying it: after all, they are only human beings like the rest of us, not the demi-gods they were treated as being.

What was interesting was rather the distribution of the votes between the other candidates: Le Pen (National Front) 14.38 per cent, Lajoinie (PCF) 6.7 per cent, Waechter (ecologist) 3.77 per cent, Juquin (dissident Communist) 2.09 per cent, Laguillier (Trotskyist) 1.99 per cent and Boussel (another variety of Trotskyism) 0.38 per cent.

The press, rightly, concentrated on the spectacular rise of Le Pen who obtained well over four million votes. At the last presidential election the far-right was so fragmented — like their equivalent in Britain today — that Le Pen was not even able to obtain the 500 signatures from local councillors to be a candidate, while at the one before that, in 1974. he had obtained less than one per cent of the vote. What, apart from the strong anti-immigrant (anti-North African) prejudice that exists amongst sections of the French population, prepared the way for this breakthrough was the system of proportional representation that was first used in the elections to the European Parliament in 1984 and then for the general election in 1986.

This allowed the National Front to send 10 representatives to Strasburg — as many as the PCF — and to obtain representation in the National Assembly for the first time. (De Gaulle had abolished PR for parliamentary elections when he came to power in 1958 but Mitterrand and his left-wing government of 1981-86 reintroduced it.) This gave Le Pen credibility and he became a national political figure appearing regularly on television; not even his various anti-semitic faux pas have harmed him.

The other significant feature was the decline of the PCF vote to 6.7 per cent. Even if the votes for Juquin, a former Politbureau member who stood against what he regarded as the current sectarian line of the PCF, are added, this still gives a figure of under nine per cent, the worst result the PCF has ever had. It will probably now never recover from this and can be expected to be kicked out of many of the town halls it still controls when next year's municipal elections come round and to never again provide any government ministers.

Le Pen described the results of the first round as a major shift in the French political landscape. To a certain extent he was right: the National Front seems to have succeeded in replacing the PCF as the recipient of the anti-Establishment protest vote. Indeed, it has been suggested that some voters switched directly from the PCF to the National Front. This wouldn't be too difficult, since the PCF has a by no means clean record on immigration. It is in favour of immigration control and on occasions has not hesitated to exploit anti-immigration prejudices, including during the run-up to the last presidential elections when, amongst other things, a local council it controlled on the outskirts of Paris sent a bulldozer to demolish a hostel for immigrants it wanted transferred elsewhere.

Not so long ago too, to publicise its way out of the economic crisis the PCF ran a poster campaign saying "Let's Produce French", to which the National Front stuck its own specially printed addition, "Yes, but with French workers". So, in peddling nationalist prejudices the PCF in a very real sense paved the way for the rise of the National Front. It must never be forgotten that racism is only nationalism's ugly sister and that socialists must oppose both equally.

Adam Buick

The French Presidential Election (1974)

From the July 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spring 1974 in France and the presidential election gets the full “American” treatment. To regale the electors there are live television debates, whistle-stop helicopter tours and pop stars singing for their favourite candidate. Opinion polls come and go and one even looks beneath the show-biz facade by finding that approximately 2 per cent, of voters in their twenties are happy with things as they are. And when we get down to the real nitty-gritty, the issues are the familiar ones: inflation, housing, pensions, taxes and unemployment. Such problems, of course, each of the dozen contestants must faithfully promise to put right at the first possible moment.

The two who survive the first round are François Mitterand, the left-wing champion of both “Socialist” and “Communist” parties, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Minister of Finance and politically a Liberal. What follows is a tooth and nail affair, a battle of wits with no quarter given or asked and incomparably high in entertainment value.

Mitterand, the railwayman’s son, plays on his humble background and consequent understanding of the needs of working people. Giscard, the rich aristocrat, deplores his opponents’ claim to a monopoly of compassion and proclaims himself “a man of heart as well as privilege”. Needless to say, both candidates, in their promises, cater for all sections of the community, from immigrants to pensioners from small traders to women. Both pledge change, prosperity, social equality and all the other familiar vaguenesses which trip off politicians’ lips at election time.

In the end Giscard, by the narrowest of margins, wins through. Perhaps it’s his “red scare” campaign that’s worked ? But if so, only just and next time he’s going to find it even more difficult to convince people that a tame Communist Party finger in the government pie represents a genuine Soviet-style threat to “individual liberty” and “democracy”. Again perhaps the French people, looking at Britain’s experience, are genuinely haunted by the spectre of “collectivism” (as Giscard labels Mitterand’s heavy nationalization plans). But the simplest and most likely explanation is that Giscard has proved the slightly superior showman, the better image-projector as they say these days.

Shadow of De Gaulle

What now? Well, a cast-iron certainty is that many of the new president’s pledges of social reform will be broken. Partly out of the usual need of capitalism’s rulers to adopt to economic and political conditions beyond their control. But also because Giscard will not wield anything like the same degree of personal power as his predecessors, Pompidou and De Gaulle. De Gaulle enjoyed a kind of Churchillian prestige amongst the majority of deputies in parliament and this earned him their almost unquestioning obedience. Hence he was able to rule France almost as a dictator over a period of 11 years. If he sometimes “bent” the constitution, he did so with the full compliance both of those deputies and of the voters who had elected them. At the end of that time (1969) these self-same deputies and voters cried “enough” and. showing where the power really lay, consigned their dictator to the political scrapheap. Pompidou was prudent enough to cotton on to the remains of his master’s personal prestige and, with the official tag of the -ism named after him, he too had parliament very much in his pocket.

Giscard will have a far thornier time of it. A member of the small Independent Republican Party, the poor relation of the ruling coalition, he commands nothing like the same parliamentary support or esteem as Pompidou or De Gaulle. De Gaulle’s faithful followers remember Giscard’s back-stabbing volte-face in 1969. After serving the General for a decade as Finance Minister, he turned round and opposed him in the referendum which ended his career. In these elections he has further antagonized those deputies (a large minority in the house) who call themselves Gaullists by pitting himself against (and beating out of sight) the official Gaullist candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas.

No great love for Giscard but fear of a left-wing success rallied most of these deputies to his cause in the run-off. He will have to tread warily in the time to come if he is not to suffer the humiliation of parliamentary vetoes to his measures. He will find it doubly difficult to satisfy these “supporters”, as they themselves are no longer united except in name, and in practice represent a whole range of different expectations.

Iron Necessity

Finally nobody, not even his enemies, denies the new president certain talents and advantages. He is highly intelligent, speaks English well and has a close personal friendship with the new German leader, Herr Schmidt. This bodes well, say some. He will rule France wisely, communicate easily with Britain and America and work in unison with West Germany. Hence a new era of harmony and cooperation, both at home and abroad. The reality of the matter is quite different. Anyone seriously thinking that such attributes in a politician can make a worthwhile impact on the jungle of problems created by the ups and downs of the world market is in for some severe disappointments. Monsieur Giscard d’Estaing will soon find out, like so many before him, that capitalism imposes like an iron necessity on its administrators the most unpalatable constraints and limitations.

The French electors too will find out that the “choice of societies” M. Giscard d’Estaing said they were voting for was in fact a choice of different tinkerings with the same society. That society is capitalism. When Giscard’s private free enterprise brand of it fails to satisfy them, as it unquestionably will, perhaps next time they will turn to François Mitterand’s state-controlled variety of the same thing. One thing is certain. As long as they continue to support parties and politicians agreeing to administer this society, they will see no basic change in their conditions of life. Only when they have the understanding to introduce a Socialist community of  voluntary work and free access, can they look forward to their full share in the wealth of the world. Then they will have made the real “choice of societies”.

The Trotskyist Vote Interpreted

Trotskyists of all shades will be jubilant with the 649,414 (2.69%) votes cast for their two candidates in the first round of the French presidential election. This means well over half a million workers ready to take up arms for a Trotskyist revolution. Or does it? Before young Lefties gets too excited, let's take a closer look at those figures.

Arlette Laguiller polled 595,370 (2.33%) votes and Alain Krivine 94,044 (0.36%). Both candidates, following the usual Trotskyist policy, invited their supporters to transfer second round votes to the United Left representative, François Mitterand. Now an opinion poll breakdown of the likely destination of these votes showed that, although the vast majority of Krivine’s supporters were following his advice, only some 60% of Laguiller’s were doing the same. The remaining 35- 40% were set to vote for the so-called right-wing candidate, Giscard d’Estaing! 

What happened ? Well most of Laguiller’s supporters were women attracted not by her Trotskyism but by the modish Women’s Liberation side of her platform. In the run-off those genuinely interested in reforms for women went on to vote for the candidate they considered was offering the most in that sphere (and they both seemed to be offering an equal bundle). Those who had simply cast a vague kind of protest vote for Laguiller (and first rounds are well known for protest votes) turned, like most of their male compatriots, to one of the two “respectable” candidates who made the greatest personal impression upon them.

The “pure” Trotskyist, Krivine, with his 90 thousand, collected less than half as many votes as in the 1969 presidentials.* And even this cannot be considered as an accurate measure of the support for Trotskyism, as on low percentage votes a good proportion are cast by chance or in error. While continuing to let themselves be taken in by the traditional capitalist parties, the French working class at least has the good sense to reject the far more dangerous nonsense aired by the followers of Trotsky.

Howard Moss

*Then he polled 236,263 (1 per cent.).

Political Notes: Tut, Tut (1980)

The Political Notes column from the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tut, Tut

“The Unions Are Angry” was a headline in the Guardian (15.10.80). Well, we all feel angry at times when things are going badly. The anger in this case was directed against ICI, the largest industrial concern in the country, who had announced they were going to lay off another 4,500 workers in their fibres division. This is of course very sad news for the workers concerned and their families. But what good does it do for the unions to be angry? No doubt King Canute was angry when the waves refused to obey his orders, but who cared? In the present case, the report tells us that ICI had lost £100 million in this division in the last five years and had actually lost a further £38 million in the last six months. No firm can carry on in the face of such figures without courting bankruptcy. And just in case anyone imagines that this problem is peculiar to the workers and management in this country, the report also mentioned that another country — Italy — which is very advanced in textiles, is losing in its fibres industry the trifling sum of half a million lire every minute. It is likely that synthetic fibres have produced synthetic anger among union leaders. They should know by now that not even genuine anger can make a scrap of difference to the normal workings of capitalism in one of its periodic crises.

What does he mean?

The words of political pundits are often as meaningless as those of the Oracle of Delphi. No doubt that helps to veil their ignorance. Here is Peter Jenkins of the Guardian (29.10.80): “The mix of the economy ought not to be an important question. A variety of mixes have succeeded in post-war Europe ranging from the dirigiste (but non-socialist) French version to the market (but social democratic) German model.” It seems to us that the spread of this “range” is from the same to the same. Just your ordinary capitalism. And what does our pundit mean by “succeeded”? Who succeeds? The million unemployed in West Germany? The million and a half in France? Still, he has managed to stumble across one spot of truth that French capitalism is non-socialist. It may even be dirigiste, only I neither know nor care what that is supposed to mean.

French lesson

Last month on French television, Michel Rocard of the French “Socialist” Party, so-called, announced that he would be contesting the presidency. Rocard, mayor of Conflans St. Honore, was educated at the elite National School of Administration.. Mitterand, his party leader, will also stand, but the cautious political manoeuvring between them is typical of the sordid power struggles of capitalism’s leaders, even if these men have the audacity to call themselves socialists. Mitterand made one statement suggesting he would not stand, and another suggesting he would. Rocard appealed for patriot votes by accusing Giscard d’Estaing’s policy of renouncing the great role France has played in history. “If he can get enough Gaullists, plus some disgruntled Communists, plus the Ecologists”, the Guardian (21.10.80) explained, “he might win”. Rocard claims to want to “get rid of the deep inequality that spoils and dishonours our society”, and he is therefore bidding for one of the most flagrantly privileged, almost regal offices that capitalism has to offer the politicians who ride roughshod on the backs of the working class. In contrast, socialists have consciously decided what they want and how to get it, and are able to organise democratically, without leaders, to that end. These confused clowns can keep their hypocritical circus acts.

Potential abundance

“Farmers have been paid between 2p and 5p a pound since the summer for fruit and vegetables which have been officially destroyed . . . The produce destroyed represents only a small part of a British food “mountain” which is growing fast as the EEC faces record crops and poor demand. The Home-grown Cereals Authority said yesterday that it expected the British share or the Community grain “mountain” to rise from less than 300,000 tonnes to 750,000 tonnes. . . Of the 12,204 tonnes of fish taken off the market this year, most has been ground into fish meal to be fed to farm animals, the rest has been used in petfood. Britain’s official food “mountain” in in tonnes: barley, 246.695; butter, 26,380; beef, 20,287; oilseed rape, 3,527; wheat, 3,152; milk powder, 2,383; rye, 300. Source: Stocks now held by the intervention board.” (The Times 10.10.80.)

As capitalism staggers on from crisis to crisis these “surpluses” are the natural result of the system of producing food to be sold in the world market at a profit. Roughly one third of the world’s population is malnourished, with millions starving to death. It is not profitable to satisfy demand which is not supported by money; the “demand” referred to in the quotation above is potent demand, from people who can “afford” food. Somebody starving to death might want food, but that does not count as demand in a system which operates on the basis of the profits of those who monopolise the food resources of the world. The alternative is a society where those resources will be commonly owned and used directly to satisfy all human needs and wants without the restrictive barrier of the monetary, profit system which can only ever work to the benefit of a minority.

Fraternal greetings

During the debate on democracy in the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool, there were certain people—called “fraternal observers”—given passes to watch the proceedings. Now these observers were doing their fraternal observing of a debate on democracy while a strike was taking place in Poland against the corrupt, totalitarian government of the Communist Party. Whose representatives were the “fraternal observers”? Not a single voice was raised in the Conference suggesting there might be something wrong in giving special invitations to these people. No doubt the leaders of the Labour Party (as of the equally obnoxious TUC) will expect similar red-carpet treatment in Warsaw in due course. From the oppressors of the working class.

Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen Part 2 (1993)

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of the article.

This month France goes to the polls to elect a new National Assembly. The French National Front, the biggest far-right party in Europe since the war, is expected to do well in terms of votes if not seats. We conclude our two-part article on the rise of its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In 1987 Jean-Marie Le Pen caused quite a stir by suggesting that the Nazi gas chambers were “a small point in the history of the Second World War”. Not surprisingly he was condemned by both the Left and some on the Right, and in 1990 was to be fined one franc for this remark. For many years, he managed to cover up his antisemitism; but now the mask had slipped.

When the French presidential election came round on 24 April 1988, Le Pen stood on behalf of the Front National (seven years previously he had not been able to get enough nominations to stand). He called for the immediate denial of jobs or social security to immigrant workers, stiffer “law and order” legislation (blandly ignoring the considerable number of Front supporters involved in violent attacks on immigrants, particularly in the south of the country), and for “an Aids-free France”.

In the first round, he received 4,367,926 votes, an unprecedented 14.5 percent. As previously, the Front obtained the highest percentage in the south—28.4 percent in Marseille, for example. But, significantly, as with the fascist Parti Populaire Français before the war, the FN made dramatic inroads into the traditional working class votes of the Communist Party. In the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint Denis for instance the FN polled 107,702 against the PCF’s 73,625. The two leading right-wing candidates. Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barre, were particularly concerned, and made strenuous efforts to attract the Front’s support in the second round. In the event, the “socialist” Francois Mitterrand was re-elected.

But all was not well within the Front National. One of their members in the National Assembly left the party to join the Gaullists. as he considered their views on immigration to be similar to those of the Front. Furthermore, despite Le Pen’s wealth, and that of a number of his supporters, the FN had been troubled with financial problems during the presidential election, and had reportedly been pressing the Rev Moon’s Unification Church for funds. Nevertheless. Le Pen was able to parade more than 50,000 FN members and supporters through Paris on May Day.

As is usual in France, the presidential election was followed, in June, by new elections to the National Assembly. This time proportional representation had been abolished and the previous two-round system restored. The results were something of a set-back for Le Pen and the FN. In the first round, the Front National received 2,359,228 votes, 5 percent less than in April. The level of abstentions was a massive 34.3 percent. Only 12 FN candidates got through to the second round and, although they won over 40 percent of the vote, only one was elected to the National Assembly.

Although of less interest, the European elections of 18 June 1989 resulted in the Front National again winning 10 seats in the European Parliament, with 2,125,077 votes—almost 12 percent of those who voted. Le Pen was said to be jubilant.

Attacks continue

During 1990 attacks mainly on North Africans continued. After one incident, where a Moroccan was attacked and left clinically dead, another left paralysed and a third killed, the Moroccan government officially protested to the French government. In the Department of the Loire, an Arab worker was deliberately killed by two men in a car; and in Saint-FIorentine, south of Paris, one Arab was killed and his brother left paralysed by a gunman. In Nice, a skinhead gang of six went on trial for kicking to death a Tunisian building worker. Asked in court why they attacked and killed the man, one of the gang laughed and replied: "We hate all Arabs, and we had to do something". While the court was in session, another group of skinheads, in the same city, set upon a black man in the main railway station, severely beating him and blinding him in one eye.

Throughout 1989 and 1990 there was a wave of anti-Jewish vandalism similar to that perpetrated in Germany and elsewhere. Scores of Jewish graves in a number of cemeteries were desecrated, mainly by having swastikas daubed on them. And so on.

In April 1990 the Front National held a congress, also in Nice. The hall was decorated with posters proclaiming that "One million immigrants equals one million jobless”. Le Pen accused the Gaullists and Giscardians of stealing the Front’s policies (which to some extent was true); and claimed that the only way of stopping violence against immigrant workers was to expel “four million of them” from the country. “France is being turned into an Islamic country”, said Le Pen. At the same time he talked of France being "dominated by Jewish power" and of the "activities of international Jewish cabals hostile to the interests of the Nation”. All old-style Nazi rhetoric. Speaking "for the little people”, and for "real Frenchmen", he said that "France was in great danger”—presumably from "four million Muslims and 700,000 Jews” (the population of France is nearly 57 million).

By the end of 1991, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National, as well as various fringe Fascist and racist groups, were more than pleased with their progress. An opinion poll, published in November, showed that the FN had the biggest support of any single party on the right, with 17 percent. And according to a survey in Le Monde, more than 32 percent of the French people were in agreement with Le Pen on defence, immigration and law and order. But 60 percent felt that Le Pen and the Front National were "a danger for democracy". Moreover, the Front's support of the Ba'ath Party régime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was not popular with many.

In December, Le Pen visited London. He did not receive a particularly warm welcome. Indeed, no MPs met him. He accused his opponents of "intellectual terrorism". And he walked out of a World in Action TV interview when asked about his anti-semitism. It is doubtful if 2 percent of the British population knew that Le Pen was in England. The British working-class may not be particularly class-conscious, but they are not likely to fall for a far-right political con-man such as Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Roots of racism

So what of the future? It is far from bright. Indeed:

Behind France's façade of high living standards and grand works lies a nation in crisis. Mass immigration has given credibility to an extreme right-wing politician while mainstream figures like President Mitterand are held in widespread contempt; financial scandal has further undermined the major parties; farmers are in revolt as their livelihoods are destroyed. (Sunday Times Magazine, 23 March 1992).

Officially, unemployment is three million. But, as in Britain, it is probably nearer four million, and still rising. As in Britain and elsewhere in the world, capitalism in France is going through one of its inevitable crises. In such a situation, racism, xenophobia and fascism increase, particularly when workers, employed or unemployed, are still nationalistic and do not understand their class position in society; when they identify with their national exploiters and oppressors rather than with their fellow workers and their families who may have a different coloured skin, or perhaps speak a different language, or practise a different religion or come from another country or continent. In such conditions power-hungry demagogues such as Jean-Marie Le Pen flourish.

At the present level of support the Front National would be able to win more than 70 seats in this month's election—if there was proportional representation, but there isn't and some commentators in France are suggesting that the Front's support has peaked and could decline. Recently, at least at national level, the orthodox right-wing parties of Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing have been refusing to co-operate with Le Pen; and without such co-operation, under the two-round system, many of the Front's first-round votes could go to them in the second round and the Front only get a handful of seats if any.

Whatever happens, Le Pen's Front National is the largest far-right party in Europe, with 130,000 members—about the same as Jacques Doriot's PPF was in 1937. It's a sobering thought.

Peter E. Newell

French presidential election: now for round three? (2007)

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

When Francois Mitterrand was first elected President of France in 1981 there was dancing in the streets. Last Sunday when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected there was rioting in the streets. Perhaps there would have been dancing again if Segolene Royal had won. But, if so, it would have been as deluded as it was in 1981 - since within a year or so France had gone through three devaluations and the Mitterrand government imposed austerity on the working class.

As Socialists, who know from Marx's analysis how capitalism works, we know that what is decisive in determining what happens to the living standards and working conditions of wage and salary workers is not the political colour of the party or person in office but the workings of the production-for-profit system. It is not governments who determine how the economy works but the capitalist economy which determines how governments act. Sooner or later capitalism forces all governments to put profits before people and to attack the working class on behalf of the capitalist class.

The only choice in Sunday's French election was between somebody who said openly he was going to do this and somebody who'd be forced to it despite what she said. So our advice to workers in France was: it wasn't worth voting for either, but as always keep your powder dry for the struggle on the economic field over wages and conditions.

Sarkozy is unpopular because he has made no secret of the fact that he's going to impose austerity on the working class from the start. He has presented himself as a French Mrs Thatcher. Things, he argues, have been too comfortable for the French people; what they need, if France is to survive in the fiercely competitive arena of world capitalism, is not measures aimed to protect them from the effects of world capitalism (as Royal was promising, but wouldn't have been able to deliver any more than Uncle Mitterrand could) but measures to adapt to and go along with world market pressures. The working week must be lengthened, the welfare state cut back, employment protection weakened - and, in addiction, the suburbs where immigrants live must be cleared of yobbos with a pressure hose.

Sarkozy has got a mandate for this, but only from 53 percent of those who voted. This will surely prove insufficient to push through these measures without resistance from the other 47 percent (and from those who didn't vote). So, expect turbulent times in France over the next few years as the class war, initiated in this case by the capitalist class against the workers, hots up.

Adam Buick