Editorial: The strikes in France (1953)

Editorial from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The strike movement which began on 5th August among Post Office workers and quickly spread to transport, gas, electricity and many other state and private undertakings and involved at its height some three or four million workers was still in progress a fortnight later; though by that time some workers had returned to work because their strikes had been deliberately limited to one or two days, and others had been reported as drifting back. As a movement to demonstrate workers' solidarity and to bring pressure to bear on the government and the employers it was complete and highly efficient. As was remarked by one observer, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “rarely has any strike movement in France, planned and announced in advance, been so successful ” (Manchester Guardian, 8/8/53).

The spark that set off the Post Office strike was a report that the Government’s “emergency” economy measures included reductions of Post Office staff and extending the age of retirement on pension. It was later denied that the Government had ever intended to make the later retirement compulsory but a possible explanation is that they were preparing the way and only the unanimous demonstration of resistance by the strikers made them repudiate it. The reason why the strike was enthusiastically joined by millions of other workers demanding higher wages was that the workers in general were finding their low standard of living being further reduced by rising prices. Mr. Douglas Jay, in the Daily Herald (13/8/53) estimated that “the average wage-earner in France today if he is single, gets a wage not much above two-thirds of what the British wage-earner gets." It is only through the higher rate of family allowances in France that the worker, if he has a wife and three children, has an income about equal to that of workers in Britain. Mr. Jay also pointed out that under French rent acts rents are exceedingly low—he goes so far as to claim that "the British worker’s family on the average spends eight times as much on rent as the French.”

But he went on to say:—

“However, these cheap rents—which the new decrees are to raise—are not much consolation to the French worker. It is partly just because food prices are so high that he has little to spare for anything else." (Italics, Mr. Jay’s).

Although Mr. Jay draws attention to these facts he fails to see how hollow they make the social reforms of the “Welfare State” which he and the French Labour leaders so blindly support. Unless the workers use their only industrial weapon, the strike, to fight for higher wages; low rents and social insurance benefits merely operate to enable employers to pay a low money wage. This is further borne out by Nora Beloff, writing from Paris to the “Observer” (16th August, 1953) on the condition of French workers.

"An official publication has revealed that they enjoy an even smaller proportion of the national revenue today than before the war: the substantial rise in social benefits has been more than offset by the severe drop in real wages. The Civil Service is proportionately worse off than am employees of private business."

So much for the alleged benefits of the “Welfare State” and of being employed by the Government.

The strikes themselves have had some very interesting features. It has been customary in Western Europe, including Great Britain, for Governments and some trade union officials to see in every strike the hand of the Communists; but the French Postal strike was started not by the Communist Union but by the anti-communist French Post Office Workers’ Union belonging to the “Labour Force” trade union federation. They took the initiative first in the Post Office and then in other industries, and the Communist Trade Union Federation (C.G.T.) and the Christian Trade Union Federation later joined in. It happens that the “Labour Force” Union is stronger than the Communist and Christian Unions among Post Office workers, though the C.G.T. claims in all 2,000,000 members as against about 800,000 in the “Labour Force” Federation and the same number in the Christian Federation. As the Times remarked (7/8/53) “ No Communist interference seems to have been needed to start the trouble.”

But though the excuse of Communist “plotting” could not be used this did not prevent the French Government from threatening to use all measures to smash the strikes, including the movement of tanks into Paris (News Chronicle 18/8/53).

The French Prime Minister when he ordered the movement of tanks might have recalled the outcry three months ago when Russian tanks in Eastern Germany were used to overawe German strikers; but the Western Governments' reaction then was very different. They approved the strike and made horrified protests about the tanks, and with their approval the American Government has been distributing millions of food parcels to the hungry East German workers. But this time it is the French tanks not Russian, and there has been no offer by Western Governments of food parcels for the hungry French workers. The Daily Worker (11/8/53) seized on this and denounced British and other unions in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions for their decision to give money to help the East German workers while not doing the same for the workers of France and Italy. But the Communists are actually taking up a still worse attitude. Some British unions have agreed to give financial help to the French workers, while the Communists, instead of helping the strikers against the Communist Government of Eastern Germany pretend that they were not strikes but “American-inspired riots.”

The real tragedy of the trade union movement in France and in the world generally is that most trade unionists allow themselves to be diverted from single minded concentration on working class unity because of their attachment to nationalism and to support of one or other forms of Government of Capitalism. Except for a brief spell after the first world war and again after the second world war the international trade union movement, which before 1914 was a single organisation paying at least lip-service to international working-class unity, has been divided into bitterly hostile camps, the W.F.T.U. supporting Russian State Capitalism, and the I.C.F.T.U. supporting Western capitalism; not to mention the Christian and Independent groups maintaining isolation.

One hopeful aspect of the strikes in France was the way in which workers in the three rival groups (Labour Force, Communist and Christian) came out on strike together, temporarily forgetting their rivalries. This, and the fact that the strikes in Eastern Germany have demonstrated the workers’ defiance of the Communist dictatorship there may give reason to hope for some future movement towards world working class unity.

In the meantime the divisions in the French trade union movement endangered the strikes. It is of great importance, especially in a more or less general strike, that there should be common action not only to come out on strike but to go back as a united body. It is equally important that such strikes should not be allowed to drag on until, under pressure of starvation, workers begin to drift back one by one. This danger was heightened in France by the efforts of some of the leaders of the three main groups to outmanoeuvre and discredit each other in the conduct of the strike and by the parallel tactics of the Government and the employers to play one off against the other.

Syndicalism: its origins and weaknesses (1986)

From the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eighty years ago this month the main French trade union confederation of the time adopted at its Congress in Amiens a Charter which, spreading far beyond France, became the doctrinal basis of a theory of unionism and revolution known as “syndicalism” (this is in fact merely the ordinary French word for trade unionism, so in France this doctrine is known as “revolutionary syndicalism “). As this doctrine has played an important historical role in working class thinking and organisation, we mark this event by publishing below an English version of the chapter on trade unionism that appeared in the pamphlet Pour le Socialisme Mondial (“For World Socialism”) put out in French by the world socialist movement in 1981 and which reproduced the Charter in full as well as giving a socialist assessment of it.

Associations of workers of the same trade have existed since the Middle Ages but only became organisations of wage earners to negotiate wage rates and conditions of work with employers in the middle of the 19th century. Up till then these associations had been mainly mutual aid societies, but even these had been banned by the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 which was later incorporated into the Napoleonic Code. Workers’ associations nevertheless continued to exist. It was not until 1864 that they were permitted to come out into the open and not until 1884 that they were fully legalised.

In the 1860s the main workers’ organisation in France was the “Association Internationale des Travailleurs” (International Working Men’s Association) which had been founded in 1864 by French and British workers. Although Karl Marx played a prominent role in its activities the IWMA was not a socialist organisation but was mainly concerned with organising trade unions and supporting strikes. It did, however, introduce some socialist ideas to French workers. Thus in 1869 we find a federation of workers’ organisations in Paris proclaiming as its final aim “the total emancipation of the workers in a new social order where the wages system will be abolished” and in 1870 Leo Frankel declaring (not quite accurately) during a trial of some French members of the IWMA that “the international association does not have as its aim an increase in the wage of workers, but indeed the abolition of the wages system”. This demand for “the abolition of the wages system” had first been raised by the British Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s and had been taken up by Marx in an address he gave to the General Council of the IWMA in 1865 (published after his death as a pamphlet entitled Value, Price and Profit which we strongly recommend for an understanding of trade unionism, its uses and limitations). It was to become a prominent slogan of French trade unionism in the period up till the First World War, after the working class movement had recovered from the setback represented by the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.

In 1895 various trade unions and other workers’ organisations joined together to form a “Confédération générale du travail” (General Confederation of Labour) which in 1902 declared its objective to be “the disappearance of the wages system and employers”. In 1906 the CGT adopted at its congress in Amiens a new programme. In view of its historical importance we reproduce (in a contemporary translation) this “Charte d’Amiens” in full:

“The General Confederation of Labour unites, independent of all political groupings, all workers who recognise the struggle to be carried on for the abolition of the wages system [. . .]

Congress considers this declaration to be a recognition of the class struggle which, on the economic field, places the workers in revolt against all forms of exploitation and oppression, material and moral, carried out by the capitalist class against the working class.

      Congress makes this theoretical affirmation more precise by the following points:

Regarding day-to-day needs. Trade Unionism pursues the co-ordination of the efforts of the workers, the increase of the workers’ welfare through the realisation of immediate amelioration, such as the shortening of working hours, wage increases, etc.

But this is only one aspect of its task. Trade Unionism is preparing complete emancipation which can only be realised by the expropriation of the capitalist class. It favours as a means to this end the general strike and considers that the trade union, now a unit of resistance, will in the future be the unit of production and distribution, the basis of social organisation.

Congress declares that this two-fold task, for day-to-day life and for the future, arises from the actual position of wage-earners, which forces the working class and imposes on all workers, whatever their opinion and political and philosophical views, the duty to belong to the basic organisation, the trade union. Therefore, so far as individual members are concerned, Congress declares complete freedom for every Trade Unionist to participate, outside of the trade organisation, in any forms of struggle in accordance with his political or philosophical views, confining itself only to asking him, in return, not to introduce into the trade union the opinions which he professes outside it.

In so far as organisations are concerned, Congress decides that in order that Trade Unionism may obtain utmost effectiveness, economic action should be exercised directly against the employing class and that the Confederal organisations should not, as trade unions, pay any attention to parties or sects which, outside or alongside, may pursue completely independently the transformation of society.”

The doctrine here expounded became a current in the working class movement that has become known as “syndicalism”. Only some of the leaders of the CGT accepted this doctrine and regarded the trade unions and the general strike as the means to overthrow capitalist rule and establish a new society. The bulk of the members were interested only in “day to day needs”, though they were sometimes prepared to support revolutionary phrases as a means of frightening employers into conceding higher wages or better conditions.

The Charter was not as anti-political as it has sometimes been claimed to be. It does not proclaim the incompatibility of trade union and political action, but only that political divisions should not be introduced into the trade unions. This was sensible, since to be effective in their role of bringing pressure to bear on employers over wages and working conditions trade unions need to organise as many workers as possible, irrespective of their political or philosophical views. They are, and must be, composed of workers of all views. To introduce political views (including the anti-politicaI views of the anarchists) is to risk division, so weakening the union in the face of the employers. In recognising this the Charter of Amiens adopted a sound position (one which is unfortunately not always remembered today).

Trade unions arise out of the wage-relation that is at the basis of capitalism. Capitalist society is divided into two classes: the capitalist class who own and control the means of production and the working class who, excluded from such ownership and control, are forced to sell their mental and physical energies in order to live. The wage which workers receive is the price of their labour-power and the price of this commodity fluctuates, like that of all commodities, around its value as determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour incorporated in it. If competition between workers for jobs was unrestricted then wages would tend to fall below the value of labour-power, as often happened in the 19th century before effective trade unions existed. Combining together in trade unions to exert collective pressure on employers is a way workers can prevent their wages falling below the value of their labour-power. Put another way, it is a way of ensuring that they are paid the full value of what they have to sell. This is the usefulness of trade unions to the working class but they can do no more than this. They cannot substantially increase the living standards of their members under capitalism but they can ensure that wages are not reduced below the subsistence level.

Trade unions, then, are defensive organisations of the working class which, in order to be effective, must recruit all workers, on the basis merely that they work for wages in a particular industry or trade and not on the basis of their political or philosophical views. This means that they are not, and cannot be, revolutionary organisations since they will be composed of non-socialists as well as of socialists. In fact at the present time, when the working class does not yet want and understand socialism, the overwhelming majority of trade unionists will inevitably be non-socialist and hence non-revolutionary. This was so before the First World War too. This was why it was absurd to expect, as did the syndicalists, the trade unions to act in a revolutionary way for this was to expect non-revolutionaries to behave as revolutionaries.

To end capitalism the great majority of workers must have first come to want and understand this change since the new socialist society which will be established in place of capitalism can only function with the conscious and active participation of its members—something the syndicalists did not accept. They imagined that they, as a conscious minority, could lead the discontented mass of workers in a general strike against capitalism. This would inevitably have been defeated with many workers being killed, especially as the anti-political stand of the syndicalists meant that the state, which controls the means of coercion, was to be left in the hands of a government representing the capitalist class.

Although the sincerity of the syndicalists’ desire to end capitalism cannot be questioned, their understanding of the future society to replace it can be. In suggesting that society should be organised on the basis of trade unions—“the trade union [. . .] will in the future be the unit of production and distribution, the basis of social organisation”—the syndicalists were merely projecting into socialism the industrial and professional divisions of workers which exist under capitalism. Since socialism is based on the social ownership (= ownership by society) of the means of production, the trade union ownership proposed by the syndicalists was not socialism at all but a modified form of sectional ownership.

The First World War revealed that not only were the bulk of CGT members not revolutionary but that they were patriotic. From this time on began a process of collaboration with and integration into the state by the trade unions which continues to this day, with the unions represented on many governmental institutions at national and local level and receiving subsidies from the state for certain of their activities. Trade unionism, in other words, has dropped its pretence at being revolutionary, though the present CGT did not eliminate its paper commitment to “the disappearance of the wages system and of employers” till 1969. This has led some to argue that as the trade unions are no longer revolutionary they should not be supported by those who want social revolution, but should on the contrary be opposed. This is not a fair criticism nor a valid conclusion.

The trade unions are essentially defensive organisations with the limited role of protecting wages and working conditions and it is by this criterion that their effectiveness or otherwise ought to be judged. By this standard, although they make many serious mistakes (disunity and rivalry, collaboration with the state and with political parties), by and large the existing trade unions do succeed in protecting wage rates and working conditions against what Marx called “the never-ceasing encroachments of capital”. Our members do join the existing trade unions and work within them to defend wages and conditions. We do not criticise the unions for not being revolutionary, but we do severely criticise them when they depart from the principle of an antagonism of interests between workers and employers; when they collaborate with employers, the state or political parties; when they put the corporate interests of a particular section of workers above that of the general interest of the working class as a whole.

But even if the unions made no mistakes of this sort, what they can achieve for the working class under capitalism is very limited. They can—and do—enable workers to get the full value of their labour-power, but they cannot stop the exploitation of the working class. This exploitation is inherent in the wages system and can only be abolished along with it through the conversion of the means of production into common ownership under the democratic control of the whole community. But this requires political action based on socialist understanding by a socialist political party for which the trade unions, with their limited defensive role, can never be a substitute.

Adam Buick

The Labor Movement in France. (1909)

From the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syndicalist and Anti-Militarist wins brought to declare for political action.

Translated from Proletary (Russian) by J. Kresswell and adapted from the Weekly People (New York).

__________

The late October, 1908, convention of the United Socialist Party and the General Confederation of Labor in France will undoubtedly serve as a turning point in the history of the French labor movement. The vacillating course and the somersaults, from “opportunistic” Socialism to “revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism” are destined to be relics of the past.

The tactics of the French proletariat, are becoming more and more similar to those of Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.

By attaching the “Socialist” Millerand to the Cabinet of the clever and masterful Waldeck-Rousseau, the French bourgeoisie succeeded in temporarily breaking down the ranks of the labor organisations. At the head of the General Confederation of Labor at that time were the reformers of the English trade unionist type, among whom were active adherents of Jaures’ theory of the co-operation of the classes. Geraud, the then secretary of the Confederation, used to support in the Federation Millerand, who opened wide the treasury of the ministry of Commerce to the labor syndicates. In those days the Confederation used to give banquets in honor of Millerand, and radical municipalities used to give to labor unions free lyceums and pecuniary subsidies. Consequently the demoralisation of labor organisations became so great that nothing better seemed to remain to honest Socialists but to join the anarcho-syndicalists in their conflict with the reformers.

In Bourges the anarcho-syndicalists, thanks to the active co-operation of the Guesdists trade unions, captured temporarily the G.C. of L. and became the moving spirits in theory and practice in the French labor movement. The reformers also prepared a fine field for anarcho-syndicalists. The hostility to political action which seized the laboring masses in the rising period of neo-syndicalism, appears only as a just reaction to the excesses of the parliamentary tactics. Only four years have passed since “revolutionary” syndicalism triumphed, yet it is now passing. We limit ourselves to a short review of the evolution this syndicalism has gone through in this time.

Arming themselves at Bourges with a complele arsenal of revolutionary phrases, our syndicalists imagined that we were on the eve of the grand sunset of the capitalist world. In their inflamed imagination the first important strike became almost the beginning of the Social Revolution. The words “general strike” became a sacred commandment. The Paris Convention of 1901 even decided to form a special committee to prepare for such a strike, and the syndicalists were convinced that the day when the working class would go on strike would be the last of the bourgeois regime. Syndicalists taught the workers that high dues, rich union treasuries and numerous syndicates lead to narrow English unionism only, that strikes must always be hastily improvised, and to prepare for them long is unnecessary. The general laboring masses they considered cowardly and apathetic, and they assigned the principal role to an active and energetic minority. These agitators being in most cases at the head of syndicates in embryo, acted with surprising self-assurance, and the unsuccessful outcome of strikes never worried them. Strikes in their eyes always served as “revolutionary gymnastics.”

With such views the syndicalists prepared themselves for the first decisive battle, which they were to give to “capital” on May 1st, 1906, in order to gain the eight hour day. Their impressive revolutionary proclamations and the previously raised hue and cry momentarily scared the French bourgeoisie. The radical ministry concentrated in proletarian centres enormous military forces. The French workingmen, without a sou in their union treasuries, without strong syndicates, temporarily influenced by the revolutionary phraseology of the demagogues, stumbled not only over the more perfectly organised capital, but also upon the government’s army. The result was the complete defeat of the workers. A great number of unions became almost wholly demoralised and disbanded. Others lost considerable of their membership—the metal workers, for instance, more than a third. The federation of pressmen, whose caution the syndicalists ridiculed and condemned, was the only one to carry on a successful struggle. This union succeeded in gaining a nine-hour day in a considerable part of France. How powerful was the blow delivered to the working class by this inflated first of May movement may be judged from the fact that the number of successful strikes for this year reached only 7 per cent., while the average for the previous ten years was 14 per cent. The Confederation of Labor, which, according to Pouget, had 250 thousand members in 1903, had at the convention of Amiens four years later only 203 thousand.

Far poorer results were shown from syndicalist practice the last two years, which even the revolutionary leaders, Pouget and Griffeulhes confess. At the same time the bourgeoisie had not remained idle. During one year the numbers in employers’ associations increased from 268 thousand to 315 thousand, a gain of 18 per cent. A more rapid progress is shown in the class-conscious organisation of capital in 1907. In the metallurgical, electrical, automobile, glass and chemical industries a series of trusts were formed almost embracing all the national industries. The league of merchants and shopkeepers alone, which was shortly formed to combat the Sunday rest idea, counts 100 thousand members. To these well organised forces of capital the Confederation of Labor proposed to give battle with the small undisciplined and provisionless army, composing only 27 per cent, of France’s working population, and only one-third of the organised labor of the land.

The revolutionary syndicalists, who during six years held noisy harangues about a general strike, understood the necessity of large and powerful organisations, when their attempt to call a general strike during the May agitation and the events at Draveil-Vigneux resulted in complete defeat. These events conclusively proved that their practical influence upon organised labor was absolutely nil. Pouget, the real head of the revolutionary syndicalists, wrote at the end of June in the Voice of the People:

“Unfortunately it must be acknowledged that if the idea of the general strike has made great theoretical gains in France, in practice we are behind even the Italian proletariat. The cause of this appears to be the state of illusion of the workers. To the practical syndicalists the lessons of the past have not been in vain, many of them have found out the errors of the past.” Griffeulhes, sec. cf the Confederation, confessed to the editor of L’Humanite that the empty revolutionary phraseology scared away the laboring masses, especially in the provinces, and instilled distrust in the trade unions. He added that what was wanted was less noise and more organisation work. Luke, the temporary secretary of the Confederation, wrote still more moderately

“What the proletariat wants are real results, i.e., real reforms. And it has come to the conclusion that for the realisation and preservation of such reforms strong organisations are absolutely necessary.”

The same revolutionary experience has been made by other “revolutionary” syndicates. They have lost the sarcastic and nagging tone in which they used to attack contemporary class-conscious proletarian organisations of Western Europe. As a result the majority of the trade unions established high membership dues. Their contempt for the necessity of numerous and powerful syndicates has vanished and such hot heads as the secretary of the metal workers’ union, advises the workers to carefully prepare for each strike and to survey the field of battle beforehand. A few ultra-syndicalists still pin their faith to “revolutionary manoeuvres.” But from the debates at Marseilles it is clearly seen how quickly the French proletariat is freeing itself from the guardianship of neo-syndicalism. 

In those debates no mention was even made of a general strike. The responsibility for the August 3rd events was by all present placed upon the government’s shoulders, but if the whole administration of the Confederation had not at that moment been behind prison bars, the “prehistoric” tactics of the “revolutionary” syndicalists would have been severely condemned there and then.

Latopy, another secretary of the metal worker’s union and a good “revolutionary” syndicalist, expressed himself thusly :

“I would like to know whether we will continue to pass resolutions, which in the future we are unable to carry out or defend. … I would that henceforth we shouldn’t enter the battlefield for the pleasure and vanity of a few leaders, who themselves remain in the security of their homes.”

This arrow was intended for the theoreticians and a few of the remaining supporters of syndicalism.

The syndicalists had to beat a retreat, as well in questions of anti-militarism and of the international trades union secretariat. At Amiens the syndicalists voted for the ultra-revolutionary resolution of Yvetot, binding them to carry on a strong anti-militarist and “anti-patriotic” propaganda, and at Marseilles, Marrheim, the prime mover of this resolution, brought forth another, in which there was not a word about “anti-militarism” or “anti-patriotism.” At Amiens the Confederation resolved to participate in the international conferences of trades union secretaries only under the condition that “anti-militarism” and the “general strike” should be deliberated. At Marseilles they were satisfied with a very moderate request: the international secretariat to be required to put on the order of the day the question of call for the convention of the international trades unions.

It is true that the “revolutionary” syndicalists have as yet preserved their majority in the central organisations, but this is because of the peculiar mode of representation at conventions, where every section of the syndicate has one vote, no matter what its numerical strength. Thus the produce union with 3 thousand members had 39 votes at Marseilles, while the miners’ union, numbering 30 thousand, had only 35. The weaker unions occupied in small production, were in fact rulers of these conventions. This is the real reason of the neglect of the majority of organised labor to obey the resolutions passed by a ficticious majority of delegates. No wonder the “revolutionary” syndicalists oppose with might and main a more just and proportional representation, for on the day of such realisation there will appear, at the head of those organisations, pure and simple reformers instead of reformers turned inside-out.

At Lyons, where the question of proportional representation was first raised, only five per cent. of the delegates present were in favour. At Montpelier this number rose to sixteen per cent., at Bourges to twenty-six per cent., and at Marseilles to thirty-four per cent., which, according to the minutest calculations, represents 160 thousand workers out of the total 170 in the Confederation. In fact, even now the majority of the trades unions, those who consider themselves “revolutionary,” do not in their practice differ from the reformers.

(To be concluded)

Socialism through the looking glass, or wage-labour as liberation (2024)

From the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone on the left in France during the past two decades cannot help but be struck by the constant references to the need for the Labour Movement to defend, yes defend, wage-labour (le salariat.) The problem here is partly that of translation. For English speakers, a ‘salaried worker’ is an ’employee’, often someone who has a certain security of employment. Salaried staff were paid monthly by direct payments into a bank account. Le salariat retains something of this flavour. In Britain in the sixties, indeed, parents were happy if their offspring could get the qualifications needed to work in a bank, earning a salary; regular work, a permanent contract, good pay, and the chance of finding accommodation. Salaried work was what got you out of the uncertainties of hawking yourself around for factory work in return for low earnings paid in cash. Those old enough to recall the sensation caused by Clive Jenkins when he succeeded in recruiting white-collared salaried staff into the trade union movement know all about this. However, that was then. Nowadays, insecure and poor pay has made massive inroads into the world of white-collar employment.

Similar considerations hold for France of course. But in this case the increasingly frequent inroads into employment conditions undertaken by the capitalists have led some Communist Party intellectuals to openly defend le salariat notably against the promotion of the pseudo-independence of workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’. As a result, calls for ‘l’abolition du salariat’ have become inaudible, if not incomprehensible. The CGT trade union literature which once considered the elimination of le salariat as tantamount to the abolition of capitalism now call for the former’s consolidation. Take for example, the 2002 leaflet by Bernard Vasseur Vers l’après capitalisme (‘Towards post-capitalism’). Or the very popular writings of Bernard Friot, very much the leading expert of social security on the left. In these publications there is the idea that le salariat represents something of a power independent of capitalist relations of production, French workers having succeeded in imposing preconditions on the employment of labour which have not only improved the bargaining power of workers but largely conquered a bulwark against exploitation. They have done this collectively by partially socialising the wage itself through reforms based on the contributory welfare system, unemployment insurance, family allowances, municipal housing and so on. In all this, the building of the code du travail has been a major vector in this progressive tendency.

Doubtless, the popularity of the notion of le salariat is due to the massive entry of women into paid work and the expansion of the service sector. This has undermined traditional trade union practices largely centred on manual workers or their French equivalent, les ouvriers. In France (but not exclusively) ouvrièrisme tended to be heavily gendered even when practised by the so-called Marxist left and white-collar workers were seen as doubtful class allies. The notion of le salarié by contrast encompasses both white and blue-collar work irrespective of gender and is clearly a step towards the notion of a wage-earning class. Nonetheless it creates its own peculiar difficulties. For example, it implies that militants have to wrestle with the intricacies of social policy given that the state is necessarily more heavily involved in the social reproduction of this class than in the simple cash nexus of nineteenth-century exploitation. The remaining confusions probably derive from the difficulties involved in capturing the reality of an exploitation which was once exclusively identified with noisy factories in the private sector.

True, however, to their often eccentric reading of Marx, the French Communists of this tendency have signally failed to rise to this challenge, their confusions over the centrality of exchange value production leading them to badly fudge its relationship to wage-labour (see Alain Bihr ’Universaliser le salaire ou supprimer le salariat. A propos de “L’enjeu du salaire” de Bernard Friot). As a result, when wage-labour is identified with the separation of the worker from the means of production and subsistence, they are surprisingly silent. Perhaps this is a tribute to the all-encompassing nature of the French ‘welfare state’, now up for grabs. For whatever reason, students of le salariat on the French side of the Channel are more prompt to mask the reality of lack of property than English social historians. Hardly surprising then that the former civil servants enjoy an almost legendary status as exemplary salariés largely because they benefit from the security of lifetime employment. It’s surely not an accident that many of the policy recommendations outlined by Friot and his collaborators read like an extension of the terms and condition of public service employment into the private sector. With politicians tending increasingly to move the cursor in the opposite direction, it is surely important to devote some effort to understanding the link between capitalist growth and the reality of dispossession.

So what then is le salariat? 

Much of the conceptual groundwork for this thinking is to be found in Robert Castel’s Les metamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat published in 1995. The American edition, which heroically translates ‘salariat’ as wage-labour, tends to over-determine the notion but is fairly uncontroversial. Castel usefully traced the development of wage-labour from its origins on the fringes of medieval society where (artisanal) work took place in organised guilds operating in parallel to peasant production. Such forms of labour were gradually supplanted by employment in its modern form as factory work although semi-artisanal forms of labour persisted and indeed still do. Marx, of course, concentrated his attention on the situation of those who begin their working lives as the sellers of labour-power on the open market. Similarly, in constructing his own particular genealogy, Castel (rightly) laid stress on the long transitional phase where a certain class of workers were pitchforked into vagrancy as a result of the dissolving of feudal relationships. Here propertyless workers emerged as vulnerable vagabonds and marginals; the despised scum of a traditional culture.

The singularity of Castel’s approach to this historical development is the emphasis he placed on the long period in France wherein semi-artisanal forms of labour co-existed with the continuation of small and medium-scale peasant holdings. Because the French economy was less subject to the large-scale enclosures typical of English agriculture, the mobility of the French working class tended to follow seasonal patterns of inter-sectional mobility. Much of the large-scale economic development took place in the rural hinterland where wannabe capitalists tended to rely upon sub-contractors and worker-peasants, classes which defy easy definition. The sharp cut-offs and sudden take-off into capitalist industrialism of the English case are not so evident in France.

In this context, employers were often sub-contracting entrepreneurs hiring members of peasant households. But there were also forms of labour involving skilled artisanal workers in the urban areas and a fluctuating group of nomadic semi-artisanal workers who dovetailed seasonal patterns of work in agriculture with occasional remunerative work in the urban areas. With the advent of industrialisation French workers managed to transform what could have been an unpromising situation of economic dependence by mobilising what civic advantages were available.

Following the French revolution, the existing code civil was extended to produce the famous code du travail. This was a movement towards a legal framework which clearly identified employers as the agents responsible for undertaking the tasks outlined in a work contract based on legal equality. (In England, of course, the relations between workers and their employers were governed by the class-biased Master and Servant Acts backed up by the severely repressive Poor Laws.) Although the emphasis placed upon legal égalité, took the form of an explicit recognition of the subordination of the wage-earner to the employer, this subordination was limited by co-managed industrial courts.

In the case of some workers, a very varied population of workers (ouvriers) recruited by sub-contractors into piece-work were increasingly paid time-wages and identified as salariés. The employers were obliged to accept their legal responsibilities towards their workers and could no longer rely upon management through intermediaries. Over time, the collective power of the working class has consolidated around trade unions which have skilfully used these legal structures to good effect. This has meant that in France permanent contracts still operate as the standard of employment in industrial tribunals and employers often have difficulty in opting out of their obligations in this respect. This is very much the reality that the notion of the salariat (or the société salariale) seeks to capture.

The current situation

This being said, Castel later traced the unremitting efforts of the French capitalist class to weaken the collective strength represented by le salariat with legislation aimed at creating a more precarious class of hired hands. (The list is long.) Against this the French Communists involved in promoting the salariat are really all involved in defending the way wage-labour has been constructed around integrative measures. This is a good way to avoid welfare-statism, or the patronising idea that wage earners as helpless workers need protection against poverty. After all, many of the measures identified with ‘welfare’ were constitutive of wage-labour and its reproduction. To a large extent, their elimination is often not at all on the agenda. On the other hand, de-naturalizing is more often than not the objective sought after.

Thus, for example, the existing pension schemes in France were better defended against budget cuts by arguing that they were in fact a continuation of the salary of the worker rather than depicting them as deferred savings granted to the elderly poor. In the same way, unemployment insurance can be seen as nothing more than a continuation of the salary during the inevitable downswings of economic activity and redeployment. Similar things can be said about family allowances which, for all their shortcomings, constitute a real salary capable of replacing the haphazard pseudo-equality of nominal wages. These are some of the more interesting points contained in the notion of the salariat, students of Titmuss would do well to note.

These points being made, does all this mean that wage-earners should be satisfied with their current position within global capitalism? Obviously not. Interestingly, Friot himself promotes measures aimed at the abolition of what he describes as ‘lucrative property’ presumably meaning private ownership of the means of production. But this is precisely the axis around which the relationship between capital and wage-labour turns, the workers being obliged by their slim grasp on the means of subsistence to sell their labour-power to employers bent on the expansion of capital. This is the point we already raised. At the moment, the impersonal forces operating within the sector of finance capital are imposing conditions of work which have more to do with profitability than with the preservation of le salariat, however defined. So to some extent the fraught relationship between capital and labour is being dragged backwards towards the conditions of the nineteenth century.

M.M.

Letter From Europe: SOS Longwy (1979)

The Letter From Europe Column from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some miles before Longwy there comes into view the reddish cloud which permanently hangs over it and over nearby Rodange in Luxemburg. As you get nearer you can see on the top of the slag heap which dominates the centre of the town a sign flashing “SOS EMPLOI". Longwy, in other words, is a steel town, and a steel town threatened with massive redundancies.

The world steel industry has been in crisis since 1974—productive capacity exceeds what can be sold profitably—and this has had serious repercussions in the old steel-making areas of Europe, such as Lorraine. The Lorraine steel industry began to develop a hundred or so years ago when a method of using the iron ore found in abundance in the area was discovered. Now that there are more modern methods of production and cheaper sources of iron ore, Lorraine is inevitably suffering the measures to reduce capacity which, within the framework of capitalism, is the only way of “solving” the current crisis. That such drastic measures were going to be necessary was evident as far back as 1976 when, instead of expanding again after a year or so of recession as on previous occasions, steel sales and production continued to stagnate.

The French government waited until the general elections of March 1978 were over (and won) before considering what to do. By then the privately-owned French steel firms were virtually bankrupt. Towards the end of last year the government announced that it was going to take over the running of these firms, appointing its own nominees to preside over the “restructuring” of the industry—the suppression of “excess” capacity—and jobs.

Over Lorraine, the government had a difficult decision to make: where to build a new modern steel works, in Longwy or in Neuves-Maisons, 100 or so kilometres further south near Nancy? In the end they chose Neuves-Maisons. As soon as the announcement was made there was consternation and anger in Longwy since the whole population realised that, on top of the already announced loss of jobs, this meant mass unemployment and a slow decline for their town. Thousands of school-children were assembled in the town centre to release balloons bearing the message “Longwy vivra” (Longwy will live). International passenger trains were stopped; wagons carrying Swedish iron ore were emptied on to the tracks; the frontiers with Belgium and Luxemburg were blocked; and lorries carrying steel products from Holland and, in particular, Germany were stopped and unloaded onto the motorway.

CRS move in

At the end of January two top managers of the steel firm Usinor were held hostage in their offices in Longwy. This led to the first violent clash with the CRS (the para-military riot police with a justified reputation for brutality) when they intervened to free the managers. The local police station was attacked with stones and other missiles. But the attack of 30 January was mild compared with what was to happen on the night of 23/24 February. Members of the CFDT trade union had been occupying a television relay station on a nearby hill and interrupting programmes to screen written messages opposing the planned redundancies. In a surprise attack in the middle of the night the CRS recaptured the station. News of this was announced to the population by the sounding of factory sirens and in no time a crowd of several hundreds had gathered in the centre of town in an angry mood. A bulldozer was commandeered and used against the gates of the police station. The crowd only dispersed after the intervention of the local Communist Party MP, Antoine Porcu, who had arranged a tacit truce: retreat by the crowd and their bulldozer in return for the withdrawal of the CRS (but not the local police) to outside the town limits. Later on in the morning the leaders of the Communist Party (PCF) dominated trade union, the CGT, organised the sacking of the local office of the steel employers’ federation; furniture was thrown out of the windows and files burned.

By now Longwy had acquired a national, and even an international, reputation of being in a fighting mood. The authorities decided that discretion was the better part of valour and kept the CRS out of Longwy, well aware that their very presence there would provoke fresh violence.

But the violence was not yet over. The two trade unions, the CFDT and the CGT had both established radio stations the latter in Longwy’s town hall with the evident blessing and support of the PCF mayor. Since the state in France has a monopoly of broadcasting these stations were technically illegal “pirate” stations and on 17 May jamming began of the CGT station. Radio Coeur d’Acier (Radio Heart of Steel). The result was the worst violence to date. The population was again called out by factory sirens and in the course of five hours fighting during the night 25 people, from the CRS as well as the crowd, were injured and 5 arrests made. Unusually, these 5 were not held in custody and, when they came up for trial, the charges against them were dismissed. The jamming of Radio Coeur d’Acier also stopped.

Clearly, the population of Longwy has shown a remarkable degree of solidarity and determination and this has enabled them to restrict the authority of the central State which has seen itself obliged to keep its riot police away and to allow the trade union radios to continue broadcasting illegally. But, and this is why the central State can afford to sit back and wait, the working class in Longwy are fighting a battle they cannot win. For in trying to keep open an unprofitable and outdated steel works they are not simply fighting against a government decision but against the economic laws of capitalism. If central governments not only in France but in Britain, Germany, Belgium and other countries too have had to bow to the logic of capitalism and cut back their steel industries, then the action of a small town, however determined, is not going to be able to override the iron law of “no profit, no production”.

Defensive Struggles

The sad fact is that the loss of the steel jobs in Longwy is inevitable and the most that the workers affected can hope for is a short postponement of their sackings and bigger redundancy payments. Indeed, this is what their solidarity and determination may bring them in the end and. if it does, it will not have been entirely in vain. But, when analysed unemotionally, it’s precious little. Like its neighbouring town of Athus in Belgium (which also had its clashes with the police when its steelworks was closed—but who remembers this now, except a few old men wondering what’s going to happen when their three-year redundancy benefits come to an end?). Longwy is doomed to decline even if its working class population had chosen to go down fighting.

There are those who don’t share this analysis but who see the clashes in Longwy as “the first flames of a renaissant proletarian flare-up” (Revolution Internationale, April 1979) and who talk of “the flare-up of proletarian violence that has restarted from Longwy” (Jeune Taupe, March-April 1979). According to these starry-eyed idealisers of violence, the events are the beginning of a revival of the working class’ “lost” revolutionary consciousness. Let’s scotch this myth before it goes any further. First, willingness to fight the police is no gauge of revolutionary consciousness (otherwise Manchester United supporters would have to be regarded as hardened revolutionaries). What allows someone to be described as a revolutionary is the aim he seeks—a complete transformation of society. In Longwy, despite the violence, the struggle is purely defensive: to save jobs (and on an issue where, unlike defensive struggles over wages and working conditions, failure is inevitable). Even the fights with the police have been defensive in the sense of being responses to actions started by the police. As for the political consciousness of those involved, unfortunately it is at the same level as in similar industrial towns in other parts of France: mostly support for the so-called Communist Party. Longwy has a PCF member of parliament and a PCF mayor.

The French CP, although still hypocritically paying lip-service to Marx’s ideas, has gone completely nationalist and analyses the steel crisis in France as an attempt by the German steel barons to eliminate a competitor. The German steel barons are supposed to control the Common Market Commission in Brussels and to have instructed Viscount Davignon, the Belgian Commissioner responsible for industrial affairs, to draw up a plan involving the dismantling of the French steel industry. This analysis would be laughable did it not provide the basis for a deliberate campaign by the PCF to stir up anti- German feelings. The PCF mayor of Longlaville, a small commune between Longwy and the Luxemburg border, has put up the following slogan on his town hall: “1870-1914-1939. La Lorraine ne sera pas vendue aux trusts allemands” (1870-1914-1939. Lorraine will not be sold to the German trusts). The present writer has seen this with his own eyes and is therefore prepared to believe reports of similar sentiments being expressed by other PCF members, the worst of which is the following from a certain J Gillet, a local CGT trade union official:

What's going to come about is the domination of Europe and France by the German capitalists. What the Germans were unable to obtain in 1914 and 1939, they are conquering today. Our action can be likened to that of the Resistance. It is a struggle for national independence (quoted in L'Anarcho-Syndicaliste. April-May 1979).

CP Chauvinism

This is not to say that the working class of Longwy are rabid German-haters. Far from it. They are ordinary workers worried about their future who, besides, being for the most part immigrants or children of immigrants from Poland and Italy, have no reason to see themselves as French chauvinists. This is why it is quite disgusting that the PCF should be exploiting the very real fears of the ordinary workers of Longwy in this way. Without exaggeration, their campaign can be said to be on a par with that of the pre-war German Nazis who blamed, again falsely, the problems of unemployed German workers on the Jews. To give credit where it is due, the smaller CFDT trade union has tried to counter this chauvinistic anti-German campaign of the PCF.

Those who see the combative attitude of the workers of Longwy as the beginning of a revival of a revolutionary, socialist consciousness among the working class are deluding themselves. We only wish that it was, but sober reality forces us to recognise that it isn’t. Yet it is an indication of the solidarity and determination the working class are capable of, a display which enables us to confidently conclude that when the workers really do want and understand socialism nothing is going to stop them getting it.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg).

The French Non-Revolution (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

France ten years ago this month. Barricades in the streets of Paris. Ten million workers on strike. Factory occupations. No wonder some people were misled into thinking that a revolutionary situation existed which might have ended in the take-over of power by the working class. But in fact this was never even the remotest possibility. No revolutionary situation existed.

Students and workers were certainly, for different reasons, discontented but mere discontent, however deep, is not the same thing as a positive desire for revolutionary change. A real revolutionary situation will only exist when the great majority of wage and salary earners have come to consciously want and understand the revolutionary change which the establishment of Socialism in place of capitalism will represent, and will express itself as democratic political action via the ballot box and not as barricades and factory occupations. This was not the case in France in May 1968.

The students’ leaders — “Dany le Rouge” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now settled down as a lawyer in Germany), Alain Krivine (still a leading French Trotskyist), Alain Geismar (later a Maoist, for a while), etc.—together with a minority of students proclaimed themselves “revolutionaries” and issued appeals to the workers to take power and overthrow capitalism. They were encouraged in this by the fact that it was undoubtedly their occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent clashes with the police that had sparked off the general strike. But a majority even of students were only discontented with the archaic French university system and would have been satisfied with reforms in this field—and were in fact to be when the Gaullist government later changed the system.

As for the workers, even though the first factory occupation, that of Sud-Aviation at Nantes, occurred in an area with a strong anarcho-syndicalist tradition, their demands were strictly of a trade-union nature: higher wages and shorter working hours. The trade union leaders, including those of the Communist Party dominated CGT, realised this and used the general strike as a means of extracting improvements in wages and conditions from employers and the government.

Industrial action

From this point of view, that of an industrial action to get the employers to disgorge a little more of the wealth they had taken from the workers, the strike can be rated a success. But even though it was part of the class struggle, and as such had the support of the SPGB (expressed in a leaflet issued by our Executive Committee in French), the general strike had nothing to do with Socialism. The factories had been occupied, not with a view to taking them over and producing for use instead of profit, but simply as a means of bringing pressure to bear on employers to concede some improvements on the industrial field.

The non-revolutionary situation in France was to be confirmed in the elections De Gaulle called in June after the strike was over. His Gaullist party and other openly conservative groupings swept back to power in a landslide victory which gave them 359 of the 487 seats in the National Assembly.

Student leaders

The student leaders accused the Communist Party of “betraying the revolution”. Cohn-Bendit referred to them as “stalinist scum” and they replied by calling him a “foreign anarchist”. But this was an illogical accusation. For you can only betray something if you actually stand for it. But the French Communist Party had long ceased to be the Bolshevik vanguard party the student leaders wanted it to behave like and had become thoroughly reformist, though remaining a dangerously disciplined party dictatorially controlled by its leaders. And if they had seized power the student leaders would not have liked the result: the establishment of a bureaucratic state capitalist regime as in Russia. Or would they? Cohn-Bendit’s position as an anarchist was clear on this point but the others were Trotskyists or Maoists wedded to the idea of a vanguard party seizing power and ruling in the name of the workers—in other words, a Leninist dictatorship over the proletariat. From this point of view the workers were sensible to have ignored the students’ appeals and to have used the strike to pursue industrial ends only.

The May events did however have a profound effect on the thinking of the “extreme left”, and not only in France. For the wildest dreams of students who make up the bulk of the membership of all Trotskyist and Maoist sects — as someone once put it, left to themselves students are capable of acquiring only a Leninist consciousness!—seemed to have been confirmed : they, a student vanguard, had been the catalyst that had set the working class in motion. If this had been done once, they argued, it could be done again, and they changed their tactics to trying to influence the working class directly instead of through “the mass party of the working class”, which in France meant for them the Communist Party and the CGT. Far from appreciating being used as an access to workers for Trotskyists the French CP did not hesitate even to employ physical violence against Trotskyist literature sellers at meetings and outside factories. Not that this shook the Trotskyists’ pigheaded resolve to be where they thought the workers were.

Entryism

The May events thus led to Trotskyists in all countries, including Britain, abandoning the tactic of “entryism” into Communist and Labour parties (though not that of electoral support for them) and to come out into the open as independent groups in their own right. 1968 marked the start of a process which has led in Britain to the appearance on the political scene of a “Socialist Workers Party” and of a “Workers Revolutionary Party”, direct descendants of groups which throughout the fifties and sixties had been accusing us of being “sectarian” and “cut off from the working class” for maintaining a party independent of and opposed to the Labour Party.

We drew a different, indeed opposite, lesson from the May events. The continuation of capitalism in France confirmed that as long as the working class are not conscious socialists capitalism is safe. Socialism can only be established by democratic political action through the ballot box when once the vast majority of wage and salary earners have come to want and understand it. The emancipation of the working class, as Marx had pointed out years ago, must be the work of the working class itself and not of some self- appointed minority.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: French “Communists” support wages system (2020)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 37th Congress of the French trade union centre, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), voted last November to change its statutes. It threw out the phrase “abolition of the wages system” (disparition du salariat et da patronat) and substituted “socialisation of the means of production and exchange” (socialisation des moyens de production et d’échange).

Of course the paper aims of an organisation tell us very little about what it actually does, but they can tell us how its members and leaders think. The CGT is led by members of the French Communist Party. So it is particularly revealing that they should wish to remove a phrase which Marx described as revolutionary and specifically recommended trade unionists to adopt.

It is also a measure of the French Communist Party’s aim to reform rather than abolish capitalism that their trade union centre should adopt instead so meaningless a slogan as the “socialisation of the means of production and exchange”. The means of production arc already socialised in the sense that they can only be operated by social, co-operative labour. This has already been done by capitalism; what Socialism will do is to end the class monopoly of these means, to establish social or common ownership as well. The CGT’s new aim cannot mean this as the social ownership of the means of exchange (banks, etc) is a contradiction in terms. When the means of production arc socially owned, wealth will be produced purely and simply to satisfy human needs. Production for the market, or exchange, will disappear and along with this banks and other commercial and financial institutions.

(Socialist Standard, April 1970)

Farce or Tragedy? (1906)

From the May 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1901 at the French Trade Union Congress, the delegates, by an overwhelming majority, decided to inaugurate a general 8 hours strike on the First of May, 1906. At the time of writing this the period is near at hand when the unions will be expected to put to the test this anarchistic idea of which they are enamoured. The wretched betrayal of the workers by Millerand and the compromising policy that was pursued by the bloc in the Chamber had its effect by throwing the militant proletariat into a fierce anti-parliamentary campaign. One can only admire the spirit of revolt which animates these wage workers who are tired of the dilettante performances of their “Socialist” reformers ; still, in spite of, or perhaps because of, that admiration, we must not overlook the means by which, they are going to try and get the 8 hours’ day.

The General Strike as such, without being backed up by a political force (and an armed force at that), has never been successful. And although some may point to Russia as a refutation of this position, the fact is that even there it has simply been used in conjunction with an armed political movement. In Italy recently the general strike did not last long, and notwithstanding that on the railways the “passive resistance” of the employees, severely hindered the work of the railroads, it did not prevent them being used. After all, our comrades of the working class of France at this juncture only contemplate a general strike for an 8 hours day, and afterwards, presumably, whether won or not, they go back to work for their masters just as before. An 8 hours day, if attained, does not necessarily mean any permanent reduction of the unemployed. Machinery is used when it is cheaper than human labour, and a restriction of the hours of labour will only mean an impetus to the introduction of machinery, and a greater intensity of labour for those at work, with a quicker wearing out of the wage slaves.

An 8 hours day is not high enough goal for the workers to try to gain, by pitting their empty stomachs and pockets against the full ones of their masters. To enter into a prolonged struggle in this manner, and for such, an object, is somewhat foolish. They are going to strike by walking away from the workshops and factories and leaving them as the full and undisputed property of their masters to be kept by them till the workers return to be still farther exploited.

The French workers have not a sufficiently extensive economic and political organisation at present for a general strike to be a success. They will have to organise as a class on the political as well as on the economic field. There must be no division, no walling-off of skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed, no splitting up of the workers in one industry into a number of antagonistic autonomous units, but their organisation as a whole in one body. When the workers are organised as a class, understanding what the aim of a militant body of workers should be (viz., the overthrow of the capitalist system of the private ownership in the means and instruments of producing and distributing the necessaries of life), they will not attempt a general strike for an eight hour day, but working intelligently with, and as part of, a revolutionary class party, they will use their organisation, not to the exclusion of their members from the workshops and factories, but to the end that the workers may run them in their co-operative capacity as the property of the working class. It will not be a general strike but a general lock-out of the master class.

The economic arm alone is not sufficient, it needs the political arm to break down the ramparts capitalism has erected in its defence. The political is not sufficient unless it has the economic to lay the foundation of the co-operative commonwealth. As the French workers are not organised in this wise, as the strike contemplated is not with the active co-operation of a revolutionary political force, and as the workers have evidently not yet grasped their mission, things point to it being a farce. A farce it will be unless the armed forces of the government are brought down on the strikers and convert a farce into a tragedy.

E. J. B. Allen

“Social Peace” in France. (1908)

From the September 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another example of the harmony existing in the present social order is provided by the recent disturbances in and around Paris. In spite of statements to the contrary, and wilful blinking of the facts, the Socialists’ contention that there exists in society a class struggle—a state of war between capitalists and workers—is borne out daily by our own experience as wage workers, and by passing events recorded (or suppressed) by the newspapers.

In and around Paris on the first of May, 1906, strikes were declared in many industries : the eight hour work-day being the principal demand. These resulted mostly in victory for the masters. However, the workers in the building trades, particularly the labourers, the masons and bricklayers, did not lose heart, but have kept up an unremitting battle for better conditions by means of other methods than big strike movements. They practised a continual harassing of the contractors, striking in detail without notice, practising “Sabotage” until, indeed, they have gained, piecemeal, some useful concessions.

This “sabotage” is worthy of some attention. Many French workers, finding the carefully prepared strike so often a failure, and the matching of Labour’s centimes against Capital’s gold louis such a long and painful process, have taken to this form of “passive resistance.” For instance, the masons and labourers would strike a certain yard or building and be quickly replaced by a fresh gang of their comrades, who would proceed to “make mistakes” in the measurements of the work, or would develop a tired feeling so that the work would not get finished, and generally “raise Cain,” thus proving very expensive strike breakers, get discharged, be replaced by yet another set of “hands,” who would “help” the employer in the same way. This would go on until the latter found it would pay him best to concede the men’s demands. Of course it is very unkind of the saboteurs, but it seems more intelligent than starving on strike for three or six months. The contractors, becoming vexed at these attentions, played a little card of their own, and in April declared a lockout, which, had it continued would quickly have involved 200,000 men. However, the employers found it more paying to open the yards again after a few days, and until recently things jogged along in much the old style.

Now we gather that a strike has been on for some time in the sand-pit district of Draveil, some eight miles from Paris, and that there have been some encounters between the police and military and the strikers—begun, doubtless, in the usual way, either by a striker punching a strike-breaker or vice versa, or, as is often the case, by some act of police provocation.

The Building Trades Federation now declared a 24 hours general strike as a protest against the repressive measures of the Government, and a large body (five to ten thousand it is reported) of strikers went out to the strike district to demonstrate in favour of their comrades, the sandpit labourers. The forces of wholesale slaughter were let loose upon the demonstrating workmen, with the result that many were injured upon both sides and several of our fellow workers were killed.

The English papers, as usual, served their masters well by reporting the affair in such manner as to prejudice, as much as possible, British workmen against their French brothers. Divide and rule is the masters’ motto, and indeed, in the Press they have a powerful means of keeping the workers fighting one another instead of uniting to fight the common enemy —the masters.

The Government’s next step was to arrest eight prominent members of the General Confederation of Labour (C.G.T.), this being followed by the declaration of a 24 hours general strike, which, owing to the numerically weak membership of the C.G.T., was rather an exhibition of weakness, although several newspapers could not be brought out and others were published under great difficulties. When later, the electrical workers struck for a short while, the military engineers were quickly at hand to replace them.

Now these stirring events arise directly from the efforts of working men to improve their lot and the endeavours of the masters to retain their privileges. Further, such events are not confined to Paris or to France, for this country has its Peterloo, Featherstone, and Belfast, America has its Colorado arid Homestead, and so on throughout the capitalist world.

The game of profits versus wages is seen to break out into barricades and sabring and shooting; the class struggle cries aloud for recognition. It is irrepressible because the workers are robbed, and are beginning to know it. Here then is generated the energy essential to the overthrow of King Capital. Here his undesirability is perceived by the worker, and the desire to get rid of him is bred.

As to the French workers, recent events show that they as well as other workers need to get control of the armed forces in order that these may no longer be used against them : the road to this control lies through Parliament. The workers must get behind the guns: to march up to their muzzles—the practical outcome of the “direct action” favoured by so many French workers and trade unionists—is simply suicide.

John H. Halls

French “Communists” support wages system (1970)

From the April 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 37th Congress of the French trade union centre, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), voted last November to change its statutes. It threw out the phrase “abolition of the wages system” (disparition du salariat et da patronat) and substituted “socialisation of the means of production and exchange” (socialisation des moyens de production et d'échange).

Of course the paper aims of an organisation tell us very little about what it actually does, but they can tell us how its members and leaders think. The CGT is led by members of the French Communist Party. So it is particularly revealing that they should wish to remove a phrase which Marx described as revolutionary and specifically recommended trade unionists to adopt.

It is also a measure of the French Communist Party’s aim to reform rather than abolish capitalism that their trade union centre should adopt instead so meaningless a slogan as the "socialisation of the means of production and exchange". The means of production arc already socialised in the sense that they can only be operated by social, co-operative labour. This has already been done by capitalism; what Socialism will do is to end the class monopoly of these means, to establish social or common ownership as well. The CGTs new aim cannot mean this as the social ownership of the means of exchange (banks, etc) is a contradiction in terms. When the means of production arc socially owned, wealth will be produced purely and simply to satisfy human needs. Production for the market, or exchange, will disappear and along with this banks and other commercial and financial institutions.

Non-Revolutionary Unionism (1971)

Book Review from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolutionary Syndicalism in France, by F. F. Ridley. Cambridge University Press. £4.20.

This is a study of the theory and practice of the French equivalent of the TUC, the Confédération Génerale du Travail, in its syndicalist period from 1900 to 1914.

The basic unit of worker organisation in France at this time was the syndicat, or local union of workers in the same trade. Hence “syndicalism”, which on its own is really just the French word for trade unionism. The CGT leaders described their policy as “revolutionary” syndicalism. They were anarchists and wanted the unions to stage a general strike to overthrow capitalism and set up a moneyless, wageless, Stateless society where the unions would control production.

The bulk OF the CGT members, however, were just militant trade unionists, interested mainly in fighting the day-to-day struggle to improve wages and conditions within capitalism. Most of the CGT’S policies for this struggle—political neutrality so as not to divide workers who need unity to defend their economic interests; recognition of the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists and their government; strike action; the only real gains are those the workers get by their own action—were just good trade unionism. Others such as sabotage and intimidation were, as we shall see, a sign of the movement’s weakness.

The anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the CGT were in the same sort of position on the industrial front as the Social Democrats were on the political front: workers supported them not because they wanted to overthrow capitalism, but because they felt that their policies would bring some improvements within capitalism. Like Socialism for the Social Democratic parties, the General Strike became for the CGT a more and more ultimate aim which had little reference to its day-to-day activity, except perhaps as an inspiration. Ridley brings out this point well.

The CGT was no more an anarchist organisation than the Social Democratic parties were socialist. Its pretensions too were exposed at the outbreak of the first World War, though it seems to have been a reasonably good trade union body for its time.

Ridley brings out a number of other valid points. Wage and salary earners were a minority both of the population and of the electorate in the France of this period. Of the 12 million wage and salary earners, only about 836,000, or less than 7 per cent, were organised and less than half of these were in the CGT. The CGT, in other words, only represented about 2 to 3 per cent of the working class. As Ridley says,

  in a sense, violence is the only path open to the weak. There is a close relationship between weak, unorganised labour movements and the outbreak of revolutionary or anarchist activity in Russia, Spain and Italy, as well as in France.

French industry too was backward. The syndicalist slogan “The Workshops to the Workers” was taken literally to mean that the small-scale workshops where many French workers were employed would be run by the syndicats, or local unions. It is significant that the nation-wide unions representing workers employed in large-scale industry—mines, textiles, railways, post office—though in the CGT were opponents of its anarchist leaders.

The General Strike was originally put forward as an alternative to the ballot box as a peaceful way to end capitalism. But, as the Socialist Party of Great Britain pointed out at the time, experience of much lesser strikes showed that any such move would be met by the violence of the State. And. why if a majority can be persuaded to strike for Socialism don’t they at least try the easier way—the ballot box—first?

The cult of action, or action-for-action’s sake, some syndicalist theoreticians espoused was shared also by extreme nationalists and monarchists which, as Ridley suggests, is why after the first World War so many of them found it easy to go over to fascism. Mussolini himself, though never an anarcho-syndicalist as such, was a leading figure on the direct-actionist wing of the Italian Socialist Party before the war. Ridley also says that it is wrong to see Sorel’s Reflections on Violence as a statement of syndicalist principles since Sorel was not a syndicalist leader or militant; he was only someone who happened to sympathise with some aspects of syndicalism at the time he wrote his book.

Unthinking activism and contempt for democratic discussion and peaceful persuasion—break-up of meetings, lectures and sports matches, confrontations with the police, physical attacks and threats against people with different views—is again being indulged in by the assorted followers of Mao, Guevara and Trotsky without their realising its dangers. This is vehemently opposed by the Socialist Party.

Professor Ridley’s book is a good analysis of syndicalism, though some may find the philosophical discussion in the third part a little abstruse.

Adam Buick

Politics: Syndicalism & the General Strike (1975)

From the January 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just as a seed contains the varied hues in a flower, so capitalism at its birth contained all that has flowered into various expressions of revolt. The misery it brought has fostered ideas of short cuts to salvation that continually reappear with different signposts.

Thus, the main arguments of Syndicalism were repeated by the Bolsheviks and their servile followers in Britain in the ’twenties and ’thirties. The Claims that Syndicalism was based on the principles of Marx; that the mass of workers were ignorant and inert, and required leading (and forcing) into the promised land; that the days of theory had passed and the days of action come — these and a host of other ideas demonstrated not only a similarity in outlook between Syndicalism and Bolshevism, but the common source of both movements.

The backbone of Syndicalism was the General Strike. As a proposed means to achieve the workers’ emancipation it has an old history, and received considerable support before the capture of power by parliamentary action had come within the workers’ reach. Like Anarchism, it attracted artists and professional people by its insistence upon leadership, its violent attacks on established institutions, its spurning of theoretical knowledge, and its promise of rapid victory.

After they were expelled from the International the anarchist movement fell to pieces, unable to make progress because of their own opposition to all organization; and the acts of violence to which groups of anarchists resorted led to vigorous police action against them. In their extremity they sought a new lease of life by infiltrating the developing trade union movement. The propaganda of the General Strike fitted in with their anti-State and general-destruction policies, as well as the idea of the capture of power by a militant minority. Sorel describes the position as follows:

Many anarchists, tired at last of continually reading the same grandiloquent maledictions hurled at the capitalist system, set themselves to find a way which would lead them to acts which were really revolutionary. They became members of syndicates which, thanks to violent strikes, realised to a certain extent, the social war they had often heard spoken of. Historians will one day see in this entry of the anarchists into the syndicates one of the greatest events that has been produced in our times, and then the name of my poor friend Fernand Pelloutier will be as well known as it deserves to be.

(Reflections on Violence)

In England and America the influence was brief (though for a short time it captured the imaginations of some who should have known better). The main support was in countries where small industries flourished as France, Italy, Spain and Russia.

It was in France that the General Strike was first exhaustively discussed and propagated. The growth of the trade-union movement led to a struggle between its advocates and those of political action At the Trade Union Congress in 1879 the Guesdist movement, which stood for the conquest of political power, scored a temporary victory, but political action subsequently lost its hold. To the impatient, industrial action appeared as a royal and easy road without having to wait. In 1888 the Congress of the French National Federation of Trade Unions voted in favour of the General Strike and the idea then spread rapidly, even receiving some support from political parties. Among its champions was Aristide Briand who, later as a capitalist cabinet minister, was its vigorous opponent and oppressor.

The arguments for the General Strike at that time may be summed up as follows. To strike was legal, so no matter how widespread it might be the government was unable to prosecute the strikers. A general stoppage of work would reduce the ruling class to famine; it would need to be operated only a short time to compel the government to capitulate and bring the workers into control of power. Its spontaneity meant that it could begin at any time and, hastened by propaganda and organization, bring about the revolution rapidly. The workers must have an organization to take over production afterwards, and the trade unions were admirably suited for this purpose.

Although a minority in the trade-union movement, the anarchists soon occupied key positions and by the middle of the ’nineties were the dominating section. Apart from their fanatical activity, they were assisted by the method of selecting delegates by group and not by number. Being divided in many small groups while their opponents were in fewer larger ones, the anarchists were able to capture the controlling influence; the few highly industrialized parts of France were not able to send as many delegates to conferences as the scattered backward parts where the anarchists predominated. Consequently each congress was “packed” by anarchists — a form of “tactics” with which we are still familiar.

Under their influence, General Strike propaganda went beyond just sitting down and folding arms. Sabotage was adopted, involving the destruction of means of production and the forcing of the support of the unwilling. The practical policy that grew out of the French Revolution and was adopted by Blanqui, Bakunin, De Leon and Lenin was based on the idea that an active minority can carry with it an inert and ignorant mass. It is a policy that depends upon leadership and always places power in the hands of one or two outstanding persons, finally degenerating into personal quarrels between these leaders. Behind it, though rarely recognized, is the conflict between idealism and materialism: the power of the idea alone against the power of material circumstances, which include ideas.

In 1895 a new federation of workers was formed, the General Confederation of Labour (known as the CGT — Confederation General de Travail). It included the General Strike as part of its programme. A conglomeration of unions and federations, it comprised all political shades but was ruled by the anarchist minority until 1909, when the crushing of a large-scale postal strike made clear the weakness of industrial action against the power of the state. The opposition to the General Strike policy, particularly by the Guesdists, also showed its failings. For example, the syndicalists were compelled to include anti-militarist propaganda, as an admission that governmental power would not collapse in a general cessation of work.

Probably the most complete expression of the syndicalist outlook is  contained in Arnold Roller’s The Social General Strike (published by the Debating Club No. I, Chicago, 1905). Sliding over difficulties and inconsistencies, the writer distinguishes between strikes for higher wages or political privileges and the strike. According to him the General Strike begins in a small way, spreads in sympathetic strikes, and develops into the overthrowing of the system; it is the culmination of hundreds of earlier strikes in which the workers have gained experience and an ever-stronger sense of solidarity.

Following that argument, one would imagine that the majority of workers had gradually acquired sufficient class-consciousness to understand their social position and desire a change in the basis of society. But this is not the syndicalist view. According to them, the mass of workers are backward and inert until the General Strike commences. Then, in the course of the movement, they become more active and enthusiastic until they convert the strike from the attainment of some minor object into the social revolution. And this change is supposed to occur in a few days or weeks, as production and distribution are brought to a standstill: knowledge grows like a mushroom out of the quagmires of disaster!

Roller is not disturbed by the fact that all workers will not come out on strike. He says: “This ideal of propaganda will, however, in spite of its beauty always be a dream.” He claims that it is only necessary to interrupt production in the whole country for long enough to totally disorganize capitalist society; this, he claims, can be done by sabotage in the principal industries. (But at another time he insists that a great advantage of the General Strike, that will gain for it many adherents who lack courage, is that it will be perfectly legal.) He makes the following very significant statement:

Modern industry, with its extremely specialised labour division and complications, is but poorly adapted to oppose a general strike caused by a minority, for the strike will completely wreck the whole system necessary for the management of production, and vital to the life of modem society.

The sabotage to assist in this wrecking was to include cutting telephone and telegraph wires; tearing up railway lines; causing accidents; loosening screws in machinery; destroying supports and applying fire and dynamite in mines; sinking ships; and many other methods of destruction — a choice assortment is also described by Pataud and Pouget in their phantasy Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, 1913. Thus, as in the policy of Bakunin, society is to be completely wrecked.

In such circumstances, what would be the position of the workers? The inert mass that has suddenly developed “revolutionary fervour” is supposed to trust local leaders, who will pacify them by reporting the progress of the revolution (how, with the means of communication smashed, is not explained). The feeding of the population in the midst of this wreckage is also glossed over with childlike simplicity, with the answer that hungry people will attack stores of food. Leaving out of consideration the action of the government, what city has stores of food to support its inhabitants for any length of time? And what about water and sanitation? It does not require a great deal of imagination to foresee disease and devastation sweeping through cities like London, Paris, Berlin and New York. If the syndicalists were as successful as they hoped, it would not be a question of bringing the ruling class to their knees but of submerging everyone in a common holocaust of disaster.

But before matters had reached such a pitch the government would have stepped in with the forces at its disposal. Roller has an inkling of this. He claims first that the destruction would be so widespread that there would be insufficient military forces to cope with it, and then that it is essential to get the military on the side of the workers: “For the revolutionising of the present order of society, anti-militarism and its propaganda is an absolute necessary supplement to the General Strike.”

Time after time the power of governments to smash big strikes has been demonstrated. Sometimes naked power has been used, sometimes concessions made, and sometimes the workers have been starved into subjection. The condition the syndicalists take for granted, lack of knowledge on the part of the majority, is a condition that is bound to defeat them by playing into the government’s hands. The experience of large strikes has been the very opposite of that anticipated by the syndicalists. The government smashed the French postal workers in 1909 by simply calling the postal workers to the colours and then sending them back to their old jobs as soldiers. Soldiers are average members of the working class made more amenable by the discipline to which they are subjected and, like the mass of workers up to the present, accept the suppression of "disorder" as a proper course of action.

Gilmac.

Part 2 of this article will deal with the Syndicalist movement in the United States of America.