'Le Programme Commun': The General Election this month in France (1973)

From the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 27 June last year a programme commun de gouvernement was signed in France between the “Socialist Party” and the “Communist Party”. These two parties, together with some left Radicals (Liberals) who later endorsed the programme, thus enter the French elections this month with a common policy which they promise to implement if elected.

In 1905 the various self-styled Socialist groups in France came together in a “United Socialist Party” under the leadership of Jean Jaurès. Adopting Marxism as its theory this party was the French equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party. In 1920 a majority of the delegates to its conferences at Tours voted to affiliate to the Third International and to become the Communist Party of France. The anti-Bolshevik minority led by Leon Blum split off calling themselves the “Section Française de l'internationale Ouvrière” (SFIO), by which name they were known until June 1971 when they joined with various left radical clubs led by François Mitterrand to become “the Socialist Party”. Mitterrand, a typical bourgeois politician under the Fourth Republic and later joint candidate of the Left against de Gaulle in the 1965 Presidential election, became the leader of this new party.

Support for Reforms
In the 1930’s the SFIO was the largest party in France calling itself socialist, the French Communist Party (PCF) having lost ground as it came more and more under Moscow’s control. During the second world war (but only after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 of course) the PCF regained this lost ground, and has been the larger party ever since. In fact at every election since the war the PCF has consistently retained the support of about 20 per cent of the electorate.

The new PS still claims to be Marxist in inspiration and it is still possible to find references in its literature to the abolition of the wages system as an eventual, albeit very eventual, aim. In practice, however, its stands for state capitalism to be achieved gradually by a series of social reform measures. Its main theoretical difference with the PCF has been its insistence on the importance of political democracy both as a means of achieving its state capitalist aim and as an essential feature of that society. In other words, it has stood for what might loosely be called “democratic state capitalism" as opposed to the bureaucratic state capitalism on the Russian model favoured by the PCF.

When the Cold War came, while the PCF — naturally — adopted a pro-Moscow attitude, the SFIO was pro-Washington. It supported NATO and the Common Market, took part in the CIA-sponsored split in the CGT, the main trade union centre in France, and denounced the Communists as agents of Russian imperialism. As one of its leaders once put it, cruelly perhaps but accurately: “the CP is not so much on the Left as in the East”. The PCF replied in kind. The SFIO, they said, were right-wing traitors to the working class and agents of American imperialism. A clear case of the pot and the kettle calling each other black.

Own Image Recognized
Now all this is forgiven, at least on the surface. The two parties have got together and drawn up a joint programme. If they win a parliamentary majority, Mitterrand would become the Prime Minister with Communist Ministers in his Cabinet. This is not the first time the two parties have collaborated on the electoral, and the governmental, fields. In 1934 the two parties made an electoral alliance which marked the end of the Comintern’s "social fascist” policy and paved the way for the Popular Front government of 1936 under the SFIO leader Léon Blum. For a couple of years after 1945 there were Communist Ministers, first under de Gaulle and then in coalition with the SFIO and the Christian Democrats. Then in 1947 came the outbreak of the Cold War and the unceremonious dismissal of the Communist Ministers. More recently the two parties agreed to field Mitterrand as the joint candidate of the Left against de Gaulle in 1965. Then in June last year came this agreement on a common government programme. What has really made this possible, it should be noted, has been the thaw during the past decade in relations between American and Russian imperialism. This has allowed the two parties to forget their foreign-policy differences and come together with a joint programme of reforms both of them had long been independently advocating.

For the much-vaunted Common Programme is merely this: a list of promised reforms of capitalism. There is nothing in it that would not be endorsed by the Labour Party in this country, except perhaps that the Labour Party with more recent experience of governing capitalism would be more cautious about promising so much at one time. The list of reforms is familiar: retirement at 60, a 40-hour week, a new Labour Code, a minimum wage, free medical treatment, a tax on increasing land values, 700,000 houses a year, votes at 18, a National Investment Bank, price controls, abolition of capital punishment, re-introduction of proportional representation, no French nuclear weapons or tests, etc, etc, etc. The arms, aerospace, nuclear energy and drugs industries, along with underground resources, are to be nationalised with compensation. So are parts of the computer and chemical industries. And the State will take a share in financing and running certain other industries like steel, petrol, telecommunications and water supply. But, as the programme itself is at pains to point out, “an important private sector” will still survive.

Letting a Tuck In

Now, nationalisation is state capitalism not Socialism, but it is what the PCF falsely says is Socialism. So how do their leaders explain watering down their aims and not fighting on a “socialist” programme? Georges Marchais, its general secretary, has, as our quotes show, [See the bottom of the article.] been quite frank with his followers. The Common Programme, he has told them, is not and is not meant to be a socialist one, even in the false Communist Party meaning of the word.

So, if the implementation of the Common Programme would not establish “socialism” what is it supposed to establish? According to the programme — and this part reflects PCF ideology — it would establish “a genuine political and economic democracy”. So yet another “transitional stage” is being introduced between capitalism and Socialism! Marx and Engels did indeed hold that between the capture of political power by the Socialist working class and the establishment of Socialism there would need to be a political transition period during which the capitalist class was dispossessed. By Socialism and Communism (the two words meant the same to them) they meant a wageless, moneyless, Stateless society. Lenin later inserted a further stage before such a society (for which he used the word Communist only). For him this new stage, “socialism”, would be characterised by the State ownership of the means of production, equal wages, etc. Then he inserted yet another stage, “state capitalism”, where the so-called proletarian state would control private capitalist industry. Now we have yet another stage — “a genuine political and economic democracy”, a reformed capitalism run by a PCF-PS coalition.

Same Old Problems

What does all this nonsense of a moneyless, wageless, Stateless society being reached via “a genuine political and economic democracy”, “state capitalism” and "socialism” mean? Is it not the old gradualist and reformist argument that capitalism can gradually be transformed into Socialism through a series of social reforms passed by a government claiming to represent the working class? Of course it is. The PCF, and its counterparts elsewhere, in fact have long been just as reformist as the Social Democratic and Labour Parties of the world. They too suffer from the illusion that it is possible for a political party to use government power to make capitalism function in the interest of the working class. The sad thing is that in France this illusion is obviously shared by many ordinary workers who are enthusiastically backing the Common Programme and are expecting great things from its implementation.

Will the PCF-PS alliance win a parliamentary majority? This is certainly a possibility, though the electoral system which over-represents the conservative countryside works against them. But if they do win, what then? Assuming that there is no constitutional conflict with President Pompidou, a Gaullist, we would predict that the new reformist government would get off to an enthusiastic start. Some of its more popular social reforms would be implemented. But then, in time, the new government will settle down to the job of governing French capitalism and the enthusiasm will wane as the workers notice no basic difference in their daily lives. The government will come into conflict with groups of workers demanding wage increases. Ministers will begin to appeal to workers not to strike and cause difficulties for “their” government. Lagging exports or balance of payments difficulties or an international monetary crisis or a too-slow rate of growth — the everyday problems of any government of capitalism — will force Ministers to make excuses for not implementing their reform programme as quickly as they would have liked. Workers will be urged to work harder and increase productivity. The familiar pattern workers in Britain experienced under the last Labour government. For many French workers, however, this will be something new since they haven’t been under a full “Labour government” since just after the war.

Needless to say the various Trotskyist groups in France (besides fielding their own candidates in the First Ballot) are saying: “Vote for the Common Programme” just as they say “Vote Labour" here. Our advice would be different. The best thing workers in France can do in these elections is to go to the polling booths and write the words "Socialisme Mondiale” across their ballot papers.

Adam Buick

Georges Marchais quotes:

  “Does this mean installing communism or even socialism? Evidently not. A socialist society has for its basis the collective ownership of the principal means of production and exchange, and the exercise of power by the working class in alliance with other segments of the toiling population. It suffices to look at the common programme to appreciate that its achievement would not lead to the installation of such a regime in France”. Georges Marchais, speech to the national congress of the French Communist Party on 13 December, reported in The Times, 14 December 1972.

  “Obviously by applying this programme we shall not establish communism, or even socialism, in France. But we can introduce democratic and anti-monopolistic reforms of unprecedented scope. And we think that this new democracy will be a step forward, a form of transition towards socialism, which is suited to the conditions of France today”. Georges Marchais, General Secretary of the French Communist Party, in an interview with The Times, 17 November 1972.

Political Notes: "Communist" duplicity (1980)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Communist” duplicity

The bare-faced lies of the Communist Parties of the world have been with us ever since the state-capitalist coup by Lenin in 1917. It is well-known that, apart from anything else, they falsify history by turning Trotsky, who so ably played the role of Lenin’s right hand (with a knife in it) man at places like Kronstadt, into an unperson, even wiping him off group photos of the Bolshevik gang. It was fairly easy for them because they were (still are) able to see to it that the Russian workers were insulated from foreign sources where the truth might emerge.

The French Communist Party had no such luck. One would think, therefore, that they would be somewhat careful. Not a bit of it. Their leader, Marchais, who for a couple of years was one of the so-called Eurocommunists who were prepared to criticise the Russian dictatorship (just a little) has now reverted to his more congenial role of hard-liner. So at the Olympic Games, where he was given the red-carpet treatment like a head of state, he made bootlicking speeches praising the Games and lauding the “intervention” in Afghanistan (somehow one thinks that if the Yanks had done it, the word would have been “invasion” — which it certainly was).

These bootlickings duly appeared on French television and in the press where Marchais got plenty of deserved stick for such things as his references to the freedom which he found existed in Moscow. But when the speeches appeared in L'Humanite (the Paris Pravda) it was too much for the comrades and such things as the references to freedom were censored out. Which in turn was gleefully seized on by the rest of the rags in Fleet Street, Paris. The sad question remains. How on earth can so many millions of French workers still be taken in by these clumsy crooks who turn the name of socialism/communism into a sick joke?

St. Kilda memory

We are familiar with the work of anthropologists who have studied the life-styles of pre-capitalist societies and shown that human beings have not always been competitive, money conscious owners and non-owners; but their examples have usually been regarded as rather exotic—Amazonian Indians, Polynesians and the like. It was all the more interesting, therefore, to see in the Guardian (July 25) an article written in commemoration of the evacuation a mere 50 years ago of the last inhabitants of the island of St Kilda in the Hebrides.

It is fascinating to read remarks about these people (some of whom are still alive in England) that recall very similar observations about savage tribes. We read, for example, that for hundreds of years the islanders existed without the use of money, something that seems to baffle those workers who imagine that apes made money their first priority as soon as they got down from the trees. “There was virtually no crime and no policeman ever landed on their shores.” The island was owned by the McLeods of Skye. “All work to pay the rent (in kind) was done communally as was the sharing out of the sea-bird harvest which was divided according to need.” “Every member of the community relied on the others for survival and notions of individual payment were strange to them. Sheep, a secondary source of wealth, were owned individually but if one man lost some, the others would make up his losses.”

The island was bleak and windswept (still is) but there is no evidence from 17th and 18th century accounts that “the islanders were wretched or dissatisfied. On the contrary, authors wrote of “the relish and gaiety with which they went about their work and of their great love for poetry, music, dancing and other jollity”. But the outside world of capitalism could not leave St. Kilda alone. “The ministers and missionaries proved a decisive influence, mostly for the bad . . .  their poetry and music, banned by the ministers, died out . . . A community, which had been a weather-beaten anachronism for a millenium and flourished with it — declined and died.”

Miscellany

Can he really mean it?

“We should not abandon some time-honoured Labour principles namely our commitment to a mixed economy, international socialism. These principles are not incompatible with a successful economic policy” (our italics). As all the governments that have run one of these “socialist-capitalist” economies (Callaghan, Schmidt) have presided over massive unemployment (among other delights), one wonders what the idiot who wrote the above can mean by “successful”? The words of wisdom appeared in a letter to the Guardian on August 18. The writer was someone called John Horam who is apparently the Labour MP for Gateshead West.

How capitalists love “communists”

At the time of writing the present wave of strikes in Poland may be in their last throes. The friendly noises being made by Callaghan and Thatcher could mean one point being overlooked. One would think that the Western capitalists would hope that their “communist” enemies would be overthrown by their own workers. But it’s not so simple. The news at the beginning of August from Hella Pick of the Guardian (and other sources) was that the west is worried. Their banks have made huge loans to the Polish government. If it is overthrown, they are very nervous about losing their money. Capitalists—of whatever variety—are in the end sisters under their skins. Workers of the world, beware!

Dead clever

The Chinese legislature meets this weekend . . .  to remove the remnants of opposition . . . To the chagrin of foreigners here in Peking, the agenda includes corporate and individual income tax legislation with rates reportedly based on the US tax code.

(From the Guardian August 30)

How to run a “workers’ state”

Mr. Szydlak, who is a member of the Polish Politbureau, is reported to have told the workers: “The authorities do not intend to give up their power or to share it with anyone else”.

(Guardian August 21)

Even professors can learn

"If one were to ask who is the biggest capitalist on earth, one would have to say: the government of the USSR. It owns and controls practically the whole of Russian industry and agriculture . . .  The capital power of the USSR, backed as it is by armed might, is enormously bigger than General Motors or any American capitalist; and it makes ICI here look like a corner drug store.

Other communist governments would follow in that list. It now seems clear that the biggest capitalists in the present age are the socialist states themselves. And the biggest in the Western world are great public corporations like British Steel-state monopolies or nationalised industries. It now seems very hard to argue that more socialism means less capitalism. On the contrary, the state is the biggest capitalist that there is. And nationalisation, or public ownership, makes it bigger still."

(Professor George Watson, Encounter, June 1980)

L E Weidberg

SOUNDS FAMILIAR!

“It has been the iron principle of the National Socialist leadership not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates; but to raise income solely by an increase in performance”.

Adolf Hitler at the Nazi Congress of Hanover (quoted by Franz Neumann in his book Behemoth).

Letter From Europe: Dictatorship of the proletariat (1979)

A Letter From Europe from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

As expected, the French Communist Party voted at its XXIII Congress in Paris in May to remove the reference to ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ from its rule-book. This was a foregone conclusion, since the Party leader, Georges Marchais, had announced two years ago that this would be happening. The only opposition came from a small group around the overrated philosopher Louis Althusser and from die-hard Stalinists like Jeannette Vermeesch, widow of former Party leader, Maurice Thorez.

‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ was indeed a phrase used by Marx, but never with the meaning the PCF has given it. Marx always insisted that socialism could only be established by political action; in other words, that in order to establish socialism, the working class should gain control of the machinery of government and use it to force the capitalist class to give up its ownership of the means of production. In his private letters and notes he sometimes referred to this use of political power by the working class to abolish capitalism as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Both words are obscure and derive from Ancient Rome. Under the constitution of the Roman Republic there was provision for one of the magistrates in times of crisis to be nominated dictator, which meant that he was invested with plenary powers to deal with the situation. Proletarii was the word used to describe the poor Roman citizens who were regarded as contributing nothing to the State but children (in Latin proles means ‘offspring’).

POLITICAL TERMINOLOGY

These two words were introduced into modern political terminology at the time of the French Revolution, the leaders and thinkers of which modelled themselves on the Ancient Roman Republic. The Jacobins were in favour of a ‘dictatorship’ by a minority of revolutionaries to crush the resistance of the nobility. The term proletaire came into use to describe ordinary, poor people. Both terms were inherited by the political descendants of the extreme French revolutionaries in the nineteenth century, including the utopian communists from whom Marx learned part of his socialism.

Marx, however, used the word proletariat in a more precise fashion, not to mean just poor people generally but only those who worked for wages: the working class. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was thus, for him, the exercise of political power by the working class in their own interest. This Marx equated with a complete political democracy in which the working class — the majority in capitalist society — would rule. His references to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ all show that he understood it to be the exercise of political power by the working class within a democratic framework.

We ourselves have never used the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in our everyday propaganda. This is not because we do not agree with Marx that the working class should take democratic political action to establish socialism, but because the phrase is obscure and misleading. We have always preferred to express the same concept by the use of phrases like ‘the capture of political power’ and ‘the conquest of the powers of government’ which are more easily understandable.

In speaking of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ rather than simply of a ‘revolutionary dictatorship’, Marx made a decisive break with the Jacobin tradition. The idea of ‘dictatorship’ was given a democratic content, since the plenary political power it implied was to be exercised by the majority class in society and not by some revolutionary minority.

By the turn of the nineteenth century Jacobin ideas has almost died out in France but were enjoying a revival in Russia, a country whose political and social system had many of the features of France’s ancien regime. Here the idea of a minority revolutionary dictatorship had an attraction for the anti- Tsarist revolutionaries, including some of those who considered themselves Marxists. Among the latter was Lenin, who carried this idea over into the Social Democratic movement.

WORKING CLASS DEMOCRACY

Lenin was in favour of the Russian Social Democrats being organised as a ‘vanguard party’ whose task would be to lead the workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities of Russia against the Tsarist regime. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was carried out in just this way — and it resulted in the establishment not of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a working class democracy, but in the revolutionary dictatorship of the Bolshevik minority. Since the economic and political conditions of Russia did not permit the establishment of socialism the Bolsheviks had no choice but to develop capitalism in Russia (largely in the form of ‘state capitalism’, as Lenin himself described it). But since capitalism cannot be run in the interests of the working class, the Bolshevik dictatorship soon became a dictatorship not just against the nobility, the capitalists and richer peasants but also a dictatorship over the working class: the trade unions were taken over by the government, strikes were banned, protests were suppressed and protestors sent to labour camps.

Unfortunately, this was not evident to a section of the war-weary and discontented working class of Western Europe. To them Russia was what it proclaimed itself to be: a 'workers' republic’ which showed the way for the workers of other countries. The Bolshevik government exploited this sympathy to split the Social Democratic parties in the West and set up ‘Communist’ parties based on Bolshevik ideology.

In France in 1920 a majority of the delegates to the Social Democrats’ Congress at Tours voted to go over to Bolshevism and set up the Parti Communiste Francais. The new PCF was committed to Bolshevik ideology, including the idea that it as the self-styled ‘vanguard of the working class' would exercise a revolutionary dictatorship. By a strange irony of history, the Jacobin idea of minority dictatorship, which had been rejected by Marx and which had almost died out in France, was reintroduced there by way of backward Russia. This time, however, it was called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was with this Jacobin, Leninist sense that the phrase was introduced into the rule-book of the PCF.

Now it has been removed. Which is not such a bad thing, since, first, it had no right to be there in the first place, and second, its being there added to the already great enough confusion surrounding the phrase.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)

Letter From Europe: Communist Party's racist policy (1981)

The Letter From Europe column from the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

"STOP IMMIGRATION, official and illegal" is one of the campaign slogans for the French presidential elections next April of . . .  Georges Marchais, General Secretary and candidate of the French Communist Party (PCF). Those who imagine that a party calling itself "communist" must have some internationalist sentiments, however vague, will be surprised at this, but not those who know anything of the history and present policy of the PCF. The PCF is also in favour of the French H-bomb and has plastered walls throughout France with a poster saying "Produisons français" )"Produce French") and its anti-Germanism has to be seen and heard to be believed. So it is not really surprising that they should also have adopted a narrow, nationalist policy with regard to immigration.

On this issue their policy is virtually identical to that of the French government: no more immigration, encouragement of immigrants already in France to go back where they came from, more or less equal treatment for those who despite this still choose to stay. When Lionel Stoléru, the French Minister of Labour, declared on a visit to Metz in October that "there is no question of admitting a single new foreigner into France"(Républicain Lorrain, 15 October 1980), he expressed a sentiment the PCF echoes, only they accuse him of not being tough enough, of allowing illegal immigration to continue!

Two PCF councillors from the Paris suburb of Ivry-sue-Seine, interviewed in Le Monde of 4 November, were asked "You want a reduction in the number of immigrants. So you and Mr. Stoléru are in the same battle". They replied "He talks, but there are no measures". As if to confirm that this was not just the opinion of two low-ranking officials in a sensitive area, the next day the Political Bureau of the PCF repeated his view in an official declaration on "The Housing of Immigrant Workers" which was published in full in L'Humanité, the Party's official daily paper, on 6 November:

These workers have been called to France by employers and a government greedy for profits. Today, the government states that immigration must be stopped. We say, we communists, yes, immigration must be stopped otherwise new French and immigrant workers will be thrown out of work. This is in their mutual interest. But M. Giscard d'Estaing's government and his Minister Stoléru do not do what they say. They contribute to the organised illegal entry of workers with no social rights with the aim of depressing the rights of French workers. We insist that these practices be ended and that the traffickers who engage in them be repressed. 

There are about 4 million immigrant workers, with their families, in France. Most of them are from Portugal, Spain and Italy but an appreciable number are from North Africa, especially Algeria, with a few from other former French colonies—Senegal, Mali—as well as refugees and others from Indo-China. There are also people from France's remaining colonies in the West Indies (Guadeloupe and Martinique) and the Indian Ocean (Réunion) who are not officially immigrants since they are French citizens but in the popular mind are nevertheless still regarded as such. Prejudice against immigrants in France is directed overwhelmingly against Arabs and black people.

The immigrants in the Paris area have tended to settle, or rather have been forced by economic necessity to crowd together, in the poorer traditional working-class districts on the outskirts of Paris. Many of these districts have PCF mayors and it was from these mayors that the pressure came to launch the current PCF anti-immigration, not to say anti-immigrant campaign. The Secretary of the PCF federation in the Val-D'Oise department, Pierre Blotin, declared at a press conference at the beginning of October that "the rate of immigrants in the communist towns of Val-D'Oise is unacceptable and dangerous" (Républicain Lorrain, 10 October 1980). He complained that employers purposely directed immigrant workers towards PCF run towns rather than to better-off areas run by the other parties. The PCF leaders in the Val-de-Marne department on the other side of Paris took up this claim, alleging that the government's Prefects were also involved. But the prize in this anti-immigration auction must go to Lucien Lanternier, PCF mayor of Gennevilliers, just outside central Paris. He went so far as to organise a demonstration to demand that immigrants be housed in a empty block of flats up for sale in the nearby, posh suburb if Neuilly!* Interviewed in L'Humanité on 4th November, under the heading "Why Shouldn't Neuilly also Receive Some Immigrants?", he explained:

I learnt that the town of Neuilly, whose social composition is known to everyone, was going to put up for sale a large complex of about 30 apartments. I immediately wrote to the mayor of Neuilly as well as to M. Stoléru and the Prefect, for the sale to be suspended and for the apartments in question to be reserved for the rehousing of immigrant workers with large families who only aspire to live in decent conditions. M. Peretti [the mayor of Neuilly] informed me that he would meet me on 29 October but two days later, by telegram, he refused any meeting. He thus closed, with the agreement of M. Stoléru, the door to our propositions. The policy of racial and social segregation practised by the government and the elected representatives of the Right can thus be judged from the facts. This attitude is part of the Giscardian apartheid which wants to concentrate the immigrant workers in working class municipalities while certain towns and fine quarters are reserved for financial magnates and the rich. 

This is rather like the National Front in Britain demanding that Pakistanis be housed in Hampstead Garden Suburb in London rather than in Tower Hamlets! And of course it is pure demagogy on the part of the PCF mayor, though it could easily have back-fired since many "native" French workers from Gennevilliers might also have liked to be rehoused in Neuilly. The PCF mayor had in fact found a very clever way of indicating to those who had elected him that he understood their sentiments of "Arabs Out" and "Blacks Go Home" without actually having to utter such words himself. For on paper the PCF (like the government) is opposed to racism, but actions such as that of the mayor of Gennevilliers clearly show that the PCF is determined to exploit anti-immigrant feelings to pick up a few cheap votes in the coming presidential elections. Unlike in Britain most immigrants in France don't have the vote; only those from colonies like Guadeloupe and Martinique do. But in any case the PCs of these islands are not urging their supporters to vote for Georges Marchais, for a quite unrelated reason admittedly (they want independence from France).

Although the PCF avoids crude expressions of anti-immigrant prejudices it sails as close to the wind here as it can. The Politbureau statement published in L'Humanité openly states at one point that the interests of French workers must come before those of immigrant workers:

Communist elected representatives employ considerable efforts to harmonise the interests of all. Immigrant workers recognise what has been done in the municipalities run by communists. But in no way can this be done to the detriment of French workers (our emphasis).   

This, no doubt, is why the statement went on to say "we approve the communist elected representaives who limit the global volume of social aid to immigrants". In other words, when it comes to distributing the meagre aid for the destitute for housing, schooling, and so on immigrant workers must expect to be treated by PCF-controlled councils as second-class citizens. "Britons First" as the National Front in Britain would say.

Adam Buick

*Since this article was written the British press has reported yet further escalation in the PCF anti-immigrant campaign. Paul Mercieca, PCF mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine (Val de Marne department), in a bid to prevent some African immigrants being transferred to his town from a nearby non-PCF controlled area, went so far as to arrange for the vandalisation of the hostel set aside to receive them. (see The Times, 29 and 30 December 1980).