Cooking the Books: Some reformists never learn (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

When, after losing the European elections to the National Rally (formerly the Front National), Macron called a snap election, the politicians regrouped to contest it. On the left, the hard-left breakaway from the ‘Parti Socialiste’ France Unbowed, the Communist Party, the Greens and the PS itself formed a New Popular Front (NFP) which emerged as the largest group in the National Assembly.

In an article in the Guardian (2 July), Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty (yes, him) described its economic policy and the logic behind it. They wrote of its:

‘ambitious policies to improve the purchasing power of poor and lower-middle-class people. These reforms include a substantial increase in the minimum wage, wages indexed to prices and free school lunches. Most importantly the NFP wants to prioritise investment in the future by increasing public spending on infrastructure – throughout the country, including in isolated rural areas – as well as in health, education and research’.

The two are co-authors of a book about elections in France since 1789 in which they concluded that it was people in small towns and rural areas that tended to vote far-right ‘first and foremost because of socio-economic concerns: they lack purchasing power, they suffer most from the lack of investment in public infrastructure’, adding ‘and they feel that they have been abandoned by governments of all stripes in recent decades’. Hence the rise of the far-right.

This seems plausible enough; it’s unlikely to be just because they want to kick immigrants out or stop more coming in (that’s only the false solution proposed by the far-right). Cagé and Piketty reckon that, if the parties of the left increase purchasing power and spending on public infrastructure they can win people away from the ex-Front National.

An increase in people’s purchasing power through higher and indexed wages and benefits and more government spending on public services and amenities is all very well but where is the money to come from? Ultimately, there is only one source: the profits of business enterprises. But the pursuit of profits is what drives the capitalist economy and if you tax them too much to redistribute income to the ‘poor and lower-middle-class’ or to pay for first class health care and education that will provoke an economic slowdown, making this unsustainable. That’s the way capitalism works and can only work: by giving priority to profits over satisfying people’s needs. Despite the political slogan, profits cannot be put before people.

The last time this was tried in France was in 1981 after Mitterrand was elected President and a government including the Communist Party came into office. In June the new government increased people’s purchasing power by putting up the minimum wage, pensions, family allowances and housing benefit but the result was a disastrous failure compared to which what happened under Truss was a storm in a teacup.

The increase in benefits had been paid for by recourse to the printing press; as a result, the internal price level in France got out of line with the international level. The franc was devalued in October and again in June 1982. By this time, the government had learned the lesson that if you are in office under capitalism you must respect its economic laws, and rowed back on its reforms, giving priority instead to trying to revive the profits of business enterprises and adopting a policy of ‘rigueur’ regarding wages and benefits. In March 1983 the franc had to be devalued for a third time.

While, to judge by the programme of the NFP, reformists in France have not learned by their previous failures to improve people’s lives by increasing their purchasing power, reformists in Britain have. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer here is skipping trying to do this and going straight to the ‘rigueur’ stage, called here fiscal responsibility.

Communist Party tactics exposed (1958)

From the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are often told by members of the so-called “Communist” Party, in their endeavours to excuse the strange somersaults of a Party professing working class interests that such behaviour is merely “tactical manoeuvres” on the political front.

The latest sample of—“Tactics, Comrade” comes from the upheaval in France among the ruling clique over their difficulties in Algeria. It shows just what anti-working class actions this tactic can lead to.

We take the following extracts from their own beloved organ—that fighter for working class CONFUSION—the Daily Worker of May 17th: —

“The special powers asked for by the Premier Pflimlin— which would automatically lapse if the Government fell— gave the authorities the right to close any public buildings, to impose a curfew, the right of search, the censorship and control of the Press, Radio and other means of communication, the right to order house arrest, to forbid movement of traffic or people.

“The group of 150 Communist M.P.s decided before the National Assembly Meeting this morning to vote for the powers under the present circumstances. Jacques Duclos, leader of the group, told the National Assembly! . . .

“The danger is great—the government of the Republic must present a solid front. The Communist Party will take part with all its forces in the defence of the Republican institutions. Considering the circumstances, the Communist group will vote for those special powers." (Daily Worker, 17th May, 1958.)

If voting for such powers of coercion as outlined in the Daily Worker report has anything to do with the struggle of the working class for Socialism—then the moon certainly must be made of “green cheese! ”

One more indictment of the Communists is contained in the following telegram sent by the British Communist Party to the Communist Party of France:—

"In this hour of grave menace of the renewed offensive of Fascist and Militarist reaction in France, we express to you, dear Comrades of the French Communist Party, our solidarity with you and with all people in the fight for the defence of democracy.

“The shameful attempted coup of the same reactionary militarist elements who betrayed France to Nazism and who torture Algerian Patriots, has aroused universal anger and disgust in Britain.

“The immediate response and leadership of the French Communist Party has won Universal admiration. The interests of the French and British peoples are indissolubly united in the fight against Fascism.

“Signed by—John Gollan, Harry Pollitt and R. Palme Dutt.” (Daily Worker, 17th May, 1958.)

Little remains to be said. From the above it will be seen by all workers understanding Socialism that the signatures to this telegram could just as easily have been —Winston Churchill, D. Eisenhower and Earl Attlee! Indeed, the phraseology is remniscent of the Churchillian exhortations in the days when “Comrade” Stalin was his ally.

G. R. Russell

Testing to Destruction (1987)

Book Review from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poisoned Reign. French Nuclear Colonialism in the Pacific by Bengt Danielsson and Marie-Therese Danielsson (Penguin Books 1986)

On 10 July 1985 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was blown up in Auckland harbour by two French agents. This act might appear to be surprising, considering the fact that both France and New Zealand are members of the "free world". This book tells the story of how successive French governments, including the "socialists" who changed from opposition to support, have been determined to use French Polynesia for nuclear weapons testing and not let any opposition get in the way.

The post-war years saw the great European empires in decline. When the French were being kicked out of Algeria, they were on the lookout for an alternative nuclear testing site to the Sahara. French Polynesia seemed the best bet — its islands are spread over an area the size of Europe and the 120,000 inhabitants were easy-going and the French had been manipulating them for years. The fact that the South Pacific is rich in food, metals and oil was another reason to maintain French dominance.

Other countries at this time were also testing nuclear weapons — the British at Christmas Island, the Americans in the Marshall Islands, the Russians in Siberia, and the Chinese in parts of Mongolia and Tibet. None of them showed much concern for the effects this would have on the local population.

When the French nuclear testing programme was announced in the early sixties the local people were mostly opposed to it. But this opposition was ineffective — the islands were run from France and the various institutions available to the islanders, to have a say in their affairs, were powerless. The authorities used various methods, devious and oppressive, to neutralise this opposition.

On 2 July 1966 the first French nuclear bomb was exploded above Moruroa Atoll. The French President, de Gaulle, was there to observe. He had made many flowery speeches claiming a great regard for. and affinity with, the Polynesian people, who were the first overseas territory to recognise the Free French during the war and who had sent a battalion to two world wars.

The French nuclear authorities, when dismissing the dangers of the tests, had said that the bombs would only be exploded when the wind was blowing east, away from the inhabited areas. This was despite the fact that winds in the South Pacific can blow in many different directions during the same day. However, when de Gaulle was there the wind kept blowing straight towards inhabited areas. Rather than keep the General waiting, the bomb was exploded anyway. The fall-out reached as far west as Fiji and Samoa. Islanders in the vicinity of Moruroa were given advice on how to protect themselves They were told not to drink rain water or eat fish for a while. This advice was not particularly helpful as this is precisely what the islanders exist on.

The nuclear programme had other effects on the islanders. Many of them were needed to work on the project. They were enticed to Tahiti by high wages only to end up in slums around Papeete, the largest town. They had to endure filthy conditions and crime, prostitution and drunkenness all increased sharply. As most of the work was needed at the start of the programme, when this finished they found themselves unemployed and unable to get back to their islands, as they had been promised.

By 1974, 42 French nuclear bombs had been exploded in the Pacific skies. Due to pressure from other Pacific countries and environmentalists the French government decided to continue its testing underground. They still used Moruroa. despite the fact that a Pacific atoll is one of the worst possible sites. The rock is thin and brittle and the many tests carried out almost certainly caused radioactive leakage and contamination of fish, plankton, shells, dams and squid regularly eaten by the local population.

The extent of the pollution caused by these tests and their resulting effect on the population can only be guessed at, as the authorities engage in the usual practice of secrecy and cover up. No reliable health figures are published and safety standards certainly appear lax. Much of the nuclear waste was dumped on the north of the atoll and washed away by several cyclones and tidal floods which have become more common in recent years. Some of these tidal waves will have been caused by explosions blowing out the side of the atoll, spilling out its radioactive muck. The fact that by 1985, 115 French nuclear devices had been detonated in the Pacific along with 106 American and 21 British, does not bode well for the future health of the islanders.

The authors tell the story of the French nuclear programme well, but their analysis of why it took place, with stories of politicians' duplicity and pride is weak. They clearly disapprove of French attempts to keep up with the superpowers and be independent and are sad that French public opinion doesn't seem to care. Unfortunately, the fact that any capitalist government exists to defend its national interest, and will develop whatever weapons it can to do this, with scant regard for the effects on people, escapes them.

There was a statement recently from a French government spokesman that they might stop nuclear testing at Moruroa as even they think that the atoll cannot take any more blasts. The underground rock is apparently in a very fragile, unstable condition. This will come as a relief to the people in the Pacific, although others had better watch out — the spokesman said they were searching the North Atlantic for an alternative.

Ian Ratcliffe

Students in revolt (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen sixty-eight was a year that made a deep impression on the French capitalist class. For them, its "second repetition" in 1986 must have come as a tragi-comedy (though for the Chirac government, it was decidedly a farce). Students, in the 70s and '80s, had been tagged (with relief?) as so many recycled zombies from the '50s: cynical. apolitical, self-centred, concerned solely with making it. Flattened out into a manageable crisis, in short. That the media (who either invented or borrowed the notion) were only busy making another of their identity-myths has since become all too evident.

But it was not clear on December 4 1986 (and much less so on November 27. when the first big student-organised demonstration took place in Paris). Considering how much hype was circulating about the apoliticism of the young, it comes as no surprise that the students themselves believed they were doing something apolitical. They wanted nothing to do with any of the official parties, yet they sought to affect the policy of a government.

This renunciation of theory can be explained as a resistance action (not at all distant in character from a trade-union struggle) that grew up around ruling-class efforts to cut corners on the cost of maintaining the country’s educational institutions. Students were actually lampooned (Nouvel Observateur, 5 November and 12-18 December 1986) for revolting in favour of the status quo. And it is quite true that in 1986 most of the reformist assumptions of the soixante-huitards were simply taken for granted by the lycéens and university students. They were, in effect, rising up in defence of a specific ideological configuration of capitalism, what we might call post-Gaullism. There is thus less irony than there may seem in the fact that an old Gaullist like Chirac should have spearheaded a Reagan-style. toothless-ideologue assault on the students’ position.

The issue was twofold: the Devaquet bill (which was moving toward the final stages of enactment) set out to reorganise (privatise) the university administration; the controversy centred around questions of degrees, admissions policy, tuition fees and school autonomy. The minister of national education, René Monory, sought to heighten the government's general de-nationalisation euphoria by introducing a parallel set of reform proposals (not a bill at that point) for the lycées. The most important effect of these proposals would have been to block future access to the universities for a significant percentage of lycéens. Hence, the impulse to contradict the government was a powerful and immediate one. Although the initiative was sparked by UNEF-ID. which was PS and trotskyist in its leanings, the student movement at both levels defined itself, on the whole, solely with reference to with drawing the reforms. (UNEF-ID was the coordinating committee among the university students).

And so it happened that a large body of "apolitical" opinion suddenly coalesced in opposition to the government, became transformed overnight into the Spectre of 1968. to the panic of an entire government; forced a delegate minister’s resignation (Devaquet’s); caused the Prime Minister (Chirac) to announce the withdrawal of the whole reform package; knocked the wind out of the sails of the liberal-conservative coalition's pointless efforts to turn back the clock and thus ingloriously aborted its nine-month état de grâce. And now everyone is talking about "politicisation" again.

How a paradox like this could have come about can best be explained by looking at the context in which the movement arose, which involves decisions about capital accumulation reaching all the way back to the Marshall Plan. Postwar investments in economic recovery and a policy of stimulating expansion in the "poor countries" at length bore their predictable fruit in the form of increased competition from the new accumulators in the developing countries. This generated a tendency towards capital flight into those same areas (where working-class organisations either did not yet exist, were liquidated or severely repressed so as to achieve a systematically under-valued labour-power). This was accompanied by the steady decline of reinvestment in basic heavy industry in the developed countries (with a few exceptions) throughout the 1970s, and it gave rise to an ever-increasing pressure on the developed countries' respective balances of trade.

This in turn ignited fears among the capitalist class in each of the developed countries for its own competitive standing in the world's markets, which has led to a period of relentless budget-chopping. As a result the capitalists currently raise the issue of whether the educational system they have been paying for is really serving its purpose to provide inexpensive (if not cheap) labour-power to keep their profits respectable. If not, then they must shake loose enough free capital from the educational budget (without of course having to retool industry, rethink their growth strategies or — horrors! — axe their precious military investments) to (supposedly) raise profits back up to an acceptable level — given that austerity (for everyone else) must be the order of the day. Throughout the developed world, the 1980s thus began to resound with public-spirited attacks on "outdated" educational systems.

Things were of course no different in France, even though it was a party of the left (the PS) that was commissioned to carry out the hatchet-job. Touted as the reincarnation of May 1968. the new regime of May 1981 fairly gushed with optimism and succeeded in blinding just about everybody, for a short while, to its patent inability to dictate terms to the international crisis. But the real mandate of the Mitterrand-Mauroy/Fabius team was identical (mutatis mutandis) to that of the Reagan administration, the Thatcher government and the Kohl regime. More importantly, however, nobody really seemed to care that a "socialist" party like the PS should be proposing to make a go of bringing back profits and jobs to French capitalism in the first place. The PS/PCF's état de grâce took only a year to hit the reefs, after which it rapidly disintegrated, as the realities of international competition took their remorseless revenge.

The Savary law reforming education thus came on the books in 1984; aspects of it affecting the private schools, however, caused as much of an uproar as Devaquet-Monory which presaged the PS's subsequent defeat at the polls. But the Savary law was itself only a symptom of the PS's underlying shift to the right (its abject caving in to the realities of capitalism), the premise being that the French educational system had become 'uncompetitive'. And so, après le déluge, the earlier Savary legislation still continues to apply by default.

What the "apolitical" students were therefore colliding with was none other than that dehumanising old fogey, the capitalist class itself, bent on extracting candlestick economies out of the school system merely to salvage its profits — even at the cost of flushing a large proportion of the high-school students out of the university system altogether. The students came very close indeed to realising that what were scraps for the workers are scraps for them too. They are all future workers in the end. or most of them are, and the fact that the lycéens had the support and encouragement of their parents indicates another burst of class struggle was in the making. Worry over the prospect of this was one of the principal factors which ultimately triggered the whole chain of events leading Chirac to the microphone to announce the withdrawal of the reforms.

On the other hand, any inkling that life is actually possible — and good — outside the wages system was conspicuously absent from this revolt of the students: for all their rejection of the system's catalogue of evils, their ideas nevertheless remained imprisoned within it. They may hopefully take the opportunity they have created for themselves to do some deeper and more independent thinking on the system's structural tendency to generate emergencies: they at least got off to a good start.

Failing this. 1986 will not turn out to have been so different from 1968 as they thought it was.

Ron Elbert (Paris)

Work — the Only Hope (1943)

From the August 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The January, 1943, issue of Time (New York) divulges the contents of a hitherto secret Memorandum prepared by the Allied Governor of Tunisia, General Giraud, presented last Spring to Marshal Petain. After deploring the reduction of working hours in France, before the War, as the explanation of France's "failure," General Giraud speaks most enthusiastically of the German regime.

  Admittedly, he says, the Germans have not perhaps got liberty, but there is certainly neither disorder nor Anarchy. Everywhere it is work, the only hope for a people who wish to live and live happily. May France remember and profit by it.

How on earth the French worker can he expected to support General Giraud, who quite openly expresses his admiration for Hitler in Germany, is hard to understand—to be consistent—he might just as logically be expected to support Hitler himself.

But then, quite a number of other people have said almost the same thing in days gone by; among them Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Croft, Lord Londonderry—and Mr. Churchill.

So, incidentally, did Mr. Charles Bedaux, whom lots of British workers will remember as originator of the notorious "Bedaux" system of speed-up. He said : "I am an out-and-out-Fascist"—he has now been charged with trading with the enemy (in this case, Germany).

It is said that he tried to buy the North Africa orange crop for the Nazis. He was a friend of the Duke of Windsor. He now faces ten years’ imprisonment.

The correspondent of the New York Times, nevertheless, considers that "90 per cent. of Frenchmen here still believe democracy can work."

Chas. Bedaux—like General Giraud—is a self-appointed authority on the great subject of work. So is Sir William Beveridge and Ernest Bevin, and Harry Pollit, with his appeals to the miners. The Socialist Standard is not the first to notice that the one thing all these experts on work never dream of doing is a spot themselves, of the kind they urge on others,

Horatio.

Letter From Europe: Greenpeace killing (1986)

The Letter From Europe column from the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When he visited the French nuclear testing site at Mururoa in the middle of the Pacific Ocean last October the French Prime Minister. Laurent Fabius, who was there to witness an underground nuclear explosion, described the opposition of ecologists and the population of other Pacific islands as 'irrational". What! Which is more rational: to participate in an experiment designed to develop a nuclear bomb that will kill people without destroying property; or to protest against such a patently obscene form of human behaviour?

Clearly Fabius has a warped sense of rationality, but what are we to think of the mental state of the newly-appointed French Minister of Defence, Paul Quilès who, asked what he felt just after the test explosion, replied "happiness" (bonheur) and "pride"? And Fabius and Quilès have the insolence to call themselves socialists! Not even Tory Ministers in Britain defend nuclear bombs in these terms, preferring to justify them as a necessary evil, the world being what it is.

In a sense, this is right. The world being capitalist, states need to arm themselves with the most destructive weapons they can afford in order to deter other states from encroaching on their interests and enter into negotiations on all sorts of issues with a strong bargaining hand. Mitterrand who accepts the logic of capitalism explained this very well in answer to Gorbachev's proposal to include French and British nuclear weapons in the farcical disarmament talks currently going on between Russia and America. The French nuclear arsenal, he said, is already at the minimum level to be credible and so can't be reduced without undermining France's vital interests. A few weeks later Thatcher made the same point in answer to the same proposal.

The simple fact is that, under capitalism, no state can agree to disarm. On the contrary, all states are obliged to arm themselves and to go on arming themselves to keep up with the latest techniques of mass killing and destruction. This is why disarmament is impossible under capitalism and why so-called "disarmament talks" in Geneva and elsewhere are a cruel trick played on world public opinion. At most there might be an agreement to scrap some obsolete weapons so as to be able to concentrate resources on other, more efficient rockets and bombs. If capitalism continues, it is inevitable that more and more states will acquire nuclear weapons, so increasing the probability that they will sooner or later be used again.

States which want to develop nuclear weapons have however one problem: they need some isolated area in which to carry out their tests. This presented no problem to America, Russia, China and India with their vast land areas, but did to densely populated Britain and France. Remote Scottish islands may be alright for testing chemical weapons, but not for nuclear tests. So at first Britain used Woomera in Australia and now carries out its tests in America (hence the so-called "special relationship” between Britain and America, the complete dependence of the British state on the American state for its nuclear weapons). France, which developed its bomb later than Britain, had at first thought of using the Sahara desert in Algeria but a colonial war and the subsequent withdrawal of France from this area put an end to this idea and Mururoa, a remote Pacific island seized by French imperialists in the last century, was chosen. Here from 1963 to 1975 France carried out nuclear tests in the atmosphere, even though it had by then been scientifically established beyond a shadow of doubt that the fall-out from such tests was biologically harmful. Since 1975, however, having caught up with the three nuclear powers - Russia. America and Britain - who had signed the (atmospheric) Test Ban Treaty in 1963, France too now only resorts to underground tests. But for over ten years the French government was responsible before future generations for knowingly polluting the world's atmosphere with Strontium 90 and other radioactive substances.

Mururoa, then, is vitally important to the French capitalist state as the place where it develops its "credible" nuclear weapons in line with the advances in mass killing techniques. Indeed, keeping Mururoa is basically the only reason France wants to maintain a colonial "presence" in the Pacific area. For, despite assurances by the French government that its underground tests are perfectly harmless to people and the environment. there is no question of it carrying out such tests in France itself, say in some remote area of the Massif Central. There would be far too, many "irrational" people around to protest (as they did over the conventional weapon testing ground at Larzac. for instance), while the protests of South Sea islanders and outside ecologists can easily be brushed off . . . or dealt with in other ways.

It was because Greenpeace - and New Zealand - were protesting so much against French nuclear tests in the Pacific, and because such tests were so vital to French capitalist interests, that the French government decided to send in a team of hired killers to sabotage the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. There is still some controversy as to exactly who in the French government gave this order; it was probably the former Defence Minister. Charles Hernu (who was quite as mad as his successor, his fetish being to dress up in combat uniform and be driven around in a tank or an armoured car whenever he could), but may even have been Fabius or Mitterrand. Hernu was eventually forced to resign over the affair, but this has not harmed his political career. Far from it. He was given a standing ovation at the French "socialist" party’s recent Congress in Toulouse and has been chosen to head the party's list in the Lyons area in next March's general election. He has even been giving interviews hinting that he might be a presidential candidate in 1988 — as well he might be, as long as he keeps well away from New Zealand, where the two members of the French state terrorist gang who didn't get away are serving a ten-year sentence. Incidentally, despite declarations by Mitterrand and Fabius at the beginning of the affair that those responsible for the blowing-up of the Rainbow Warrior and the killing of one of its crew would be punished in France if found to be French citizens, the rest of the terrorist gang — whose names are known — have gone scot-free and are continuing their training as hired killers in the service of the French state. The only members of the French Secret Service to have been put in prison over the affair are those who leaked the truth to the press.

This double standard when it comes to terrorism is typical of the dirty business of administering a capitalist state. Denunciation of private-enterprise terrorist groups or of terrorist groups controlled by other states, but excuses for your own state's terrorist activities. There is even a diplomatic word for this: raison d'Etat in French. Realpolitik in German. The fact remains that the biggest terrorist organisations in the world are the various armed states into which it is artificially divided. They kill, maim and torture many, many more people than the IRAs, the ETAs and other such maniacs. It is the task of the socialist movement to sweep away all states, with their willing servants like Mitterrand. Fabius, Hernu, Quilès and other such grotesque non-entities — and establish a world stateless community in which weapons of war. conventional as well as nuclear, will not exist because they will not be needed.

Adam Buick (Paris)