After three years of sharing responsibility for governing French capitalism (for two of which, beginning with the four-month wage freeze imposed in June 1982, the government pursued an openly anti-working class policy), the PCF has decided it has had enough. When Mitterrand changed his Prime Minister in July the PCF found an excuse not to participate in the new government of Laurent Fabius, a whizz-kid of bourgeois origin (his father is a rich art dealer) the successor of Pierre Mauroy.
Although Mitterrand did not insist that the PCF should be excluded he was probably satisfied that they decided to go of their own accord. He had after all changed his Prime Minister precisely to give the impression. in the run-up to the 1986 General Election, that he had broken with his failed past policies. He wanted to alter his government's image by having as Prime Minister a man who better incarnated the change of policy towards the crisis forced on the government by the operation of capitalism: the “modernisation” of industry.
His government had in fact been pursuing this policy for some time but the presence of Mauroy as Prime Minister — and of the PCF ministers — represented a visible link with the previous, failed policy (on which both Mitterrand and his parliamentary majority had been elected) of trying to make capitalism work in the interest of the working class. This policy had been abandoned as long ago as June 1982 when the wage freeze was imposed and a deliberate policy of helping enterprises to restore their profit margins was adopted. It was abandoned, we hasten to add, not because Mitterrand and his government had decided to betray the working class but because it was unrealistic, in fact impossible, since capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class. That the previous policy was unrealistic in capitalist terms was explicitly recognised by Mitterrand who repeatedly declared, for the benefit of the PCF and certain members of his own party who wanted to continue the old policy, that the policy adopted in June 1982 was "the only one possible”.
During the presidential campaign in 1981 Mitterrand and his supporters had promised to end the crisis and reduce unemployment by increasing “popular consumption”, by giving people more money to spend as a way of stimulating production. This wouldn’t work as crises under capitalism are not caused by a lack of purchasing power but by a lack of prospects for profit-making.
But it is true that Mitterrand and Mauroy did begin by honouring their promise. The minimum wage was increased, social benefits were improved, more civil servants were taken on. This increase in “popular consumption" financed by the printing press led to prices rising in France faster than among its commercial rivals, bringing about an increase in imports and a drop in exports, a balance of payments crisis and as early as October 1981 a devaluation of the franc. From then on it was downhill all the way: June 1982: Second devaluation. First austerity package. March 1983: Third devaluation and second austerity package.
Meanwhile unemployment grew from the 1,630,700 it was when Mitterrand came into office to 2,147.700 in June 1984.
Parallel with this economic failure went a growing disaffection of those who had voted for Mitterrand and the Left in 1981. Local elections and by-elections all showed a steady swing to the rightwing opposition parties, including the National Front (basically the same as its British counterpart) which, in the recent European elections, polled nearly as many votes as the PCF and won itself 10 members in the 81-member French delegation to the European Parliament.
Here too Mitterrand and his party decided to operate a tactical turn. Instead of appealing to the working class — to whom they had now learned they had nothing to offer given the way the capitalist system operates — they decided to try to show that the Left was just as capable as the Right of managing capitalism—and of imposing the anti-working class decisions that this necessarily involves. If we are going to lose the 1986 General Election, the reasoning went, let us at least show that we are capable administrators of capitalism so that the charge of economic incompetence cannot be levelled against us in the 1991 elections.
Mitterrand began to adopt the language of his conservative predecessor. Giscard. The same terms — modernisation, enterprise, innovation, competitivity, risk, initiative. profit — rolled off his lips. Taxed about this in a newspaper interview on the third anniversary of his election as President. he replied:
What! The words modernisation, enterprise. innovation and the rest are rightwing? That’s an absurd assumption. (Liberation, 10 May 1984).
"Modernisation” is a nice-sounding word, suggesting the building of new factories with robots, automation and the rest. In fact it is a euphemism to describe what always happens when capitalism is in one of its periodic depressions. The least productive enterprises go to the wall and are eliminated from the competitive struggle for profits. This results in a rise in the average productivity in particular industries and so in a fall in their average costs, this putting them in a better competitive position against the same industries in other countries. In other words, the rise in average productivity and so in competitivity comes about not so much through the introduction of modern machines as through the elimination of old-fashioned ones — and of the jobs of those who operate them.
This is what modernisation means in practice. So the workers of France have nothing to gain from the new government’s declared intention, expressed in the new Prime Minister’s first declaration on the very evening of the day he was appointed, to "modernise the country”. This inevitably means more closures, more sackings, more job losses, more unemployment. Fabius openly admitted this in the new government's policy declaration before the National Assembly on 24 July:
Modernisation — one must have the honesty to say so — may cost more jobs before creating them (Liberation, 25 July).
This argument that the way to full employment lies through letting unemployment grow in a depression through the elimination of inefficient firms is true to the extent that slump conditions, if allowed to work themselves through, do eventually prepare the ground for the subsequent period of boom (and vice versa of course, though capitalist politicians are not so keen on mentioning this, anxious as they are to maintain the illusion that a boom can be made to be permanent). But this represents a complete U-turn compared to the pre-1981 election promises of Mitterrand and his parliamentary majority. Not that there was really any choice in the matter: any government has to adopt this approach sooner or later, whether willingly (like Reagan and Thatcher) or reluctantly (like Mitterrand, perhaps), since it is dictated by the economic logic of the capitalist system within which they work.
Mitterrand himself, in his interview with Liberation on 10 May, had also been explicit enough about what modernisation would involve:
If you consider that being on the Left rules out modernising the country because of the suffering that all change causes, then I can't follow you. And yet I ask myself everyday about what I have the right to ask of the working class which has been the victim of so many injustices and so much oppression since the coming of the industrial era.
And two months later, on a visit to the Auvergne region of France, he told complaining trade unionists:
The state is not an industry, and the nationalised enterprises are not there to serve the state. Certainly, they have particular duties, but they must manage, invest, organise according to the idea which they form. If they were to be transformed into a government department, you would see the substitution of a bureaucracy for all the living forces. The idea that a nationalised enterprise can escape from the crisis and artificially create jobs? No, that would be to undermine a sector that I have extended (Le Monde, 8/9 July 1984).
Adding, as off-the-cuff remarks that might have come from Thatcher or Reagan (or Kinnock after he has had three years experience of administering capitalism — if he ever gets the chance, that is), “the state does not have the task of creating industries. of rushing to the aid of enterprises in danger" and “one cannot ask the state to be satisfied with covering losses. It must also make profits" (Liberation. 7/8 July).
In a sense, in belatedly withdrawing from the government the PCF has been more loyal to the promises on which Mitterrand and the PS/PCF parliamentary majority were elected than have Mitterrand and the PS. But what the PCF fails to realise is that these promises were quite unrealistic and could not have been honoured because of the very nature of the capitalist system within which they were to be implemented. Capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary earners. It is a profit-making system that can only work in the interest of those who live off profits derived from exploiting wage-labour. Mitterrand and the PS learned this within a year of coming to power and then settled down to administering capitalism in the only way it can be: against the working class.
The PCF, even though it accepted for at least two years to go along with the anti-working class policy any government of capitalism is sooner or later obliged to adopt, still entertains the old illusions. But there's no particular merit in remaining loyal to promises that have been proved to be illusory.
The PCF will no doubt now go before the workers telling them that Mitterrand and his government have failed because they have deliberately chosen to pursue a pro-capitalist rather than a pro-working class policy, whereas this failure was not a question of intention or sincerity or determination but due to the nature of capitalism. Mitterrand, the PS and indeed the PCF failed because in the context of capitalism this was pre-programmed. No government can make capitalism serve the interest of the wage and salary earning majority.
Adam Buick
(Luxemburg)
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