Between the Lines: Queen of the Scroungers (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Queen of the Scroungers

The BBC's shock revelation that the Queen is a human being with an almost real voice, after decades of giving the appearance of a mindless stuffed dummy impersonating a parasitical insect, was compulsive viewing. Elizabeth R (BBC1, 6 February, 8pm) followed this unelected Head of State for a year in her useless life. It was quite evident that forty years in the job had turned the woman quite barmy, unable to perceive social reality except as a prepared theatrical performance. Her idiotic advisers, recruited from the dregs of aristocratic idleness, always stand up in her presence and call her mam. She is never criticised and is consciously treated with sycophantic worship by her oafish followers.

In one scene she was shown with Kenneth Baker and Neil Kinnock who competed to each give the greater impression that they were indistinguishable from her corgis. The only passion shown by this pointless being in the whole recorded year was once when she was watching her horse come fourth in a race and once when she was entertaining the Reagans on her Royal yacht in Florida. The horse was not interviewed and had no chance to explain why it came fourth, but Reagan was given every opportunity to show that he had a lower IQ than the horse and a remarkably similar enjoyment of luxurious living to any Royal low-life.

In the exchange between Liz and Ron (in which we assume that she thought that he was Margaret Thatcher and he thought she was Oliver North) the Queen declared that, in her opinion, all of the "democracies" (i.e. nations like Britain where governments are elected but Heads of State aren't) are going broke. This was a perceptive remark. We assume that R Liz has been quietly studying Marxian crisis-theory between periods of scholarly examination of The Sporting Life. She then went on to say that countries are going broke because they spend too much on welfare and there are too many people who have grown used to grabbing all they can get. This from the biggest state scrounger in Britain!

So, do socialists plan to abolish the Queen? Why bother when we have a much more ambitious abolition in mind: the removal of the entire capitalist class as a group of legalised scroungers who live off the backs of the wealth-producing majority.

Powerful Sisters

If parasites like the Queen give women a bad name, the superb Channel Four documentary about the Amazon Sisters (3 February, 11 pm) showed the strength of those Brazilian women whose lives are being ruined by the coming of industrial capitalism to the rainforests where they have lived for generations.

These women were not out to ask humbly for this or that reform. They would demean themselves before no monarchical goddess who must be called mam. They were opposed to the coming of wage slavery. They spoke and sang with refreshing directness and passion about their hatred of what the profit system is doing to ruin their lives and the ecology of the area they inhabit — an area which is larger in size than Europe. These women, without formal education or political theories, were able to articulate the antagonism between the power of property and profit and the strength which comes from seeking to retain your humanity without having to sell it on the market.

The Amazonian women will lose their struggle against forces backed by billions of dollars. But their struggle will be won as soon as their fellow workers, in other lands and situations, all realise that it is as wage slaves that we are denied the freedom to control our lives and have access to the goods of the Earth. Watching these women was as refreshingly vital as watching the Queen was tediously depressing.

A Führer for France?

BBC's Assignment (4 February, 7.45pm) was a profile of the French racist leader of the fast-growing Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The man himself is a wild personality, not unlike a Breton Ian Paisley. He is playing on the fears within France that the recession is getting worse (unemployment is at 10 percent) and Arab immigrants are to be blamed for taking away French jobs.

Le Pen is undoubtedly on the rise, as are racist parties in Germany and Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is quite possible that Le Pen could become the next French President; the Front's results in this month's provincial elections will indicate how likely that is. In response to Le Pen the other leading politicians, eager for state power, are trying to outdo him in racist rhetoric. Chirac and Giscard are making speeches which could quite well have been spewed out by Enoch Powell in Britain in the 1960s, and Mitterand's bogus Socialist Party is passing laws to prevent immigrants from having rights in France.

Fifty years ago France was occupied by the Nazis. The first time it was tragedy and Le Pen is rehearsing the farce. Meanwhile, we are quite sure that, if elected, a state banquet for Führer Le Pen will be hosted by Elizabeth R. After all, the first thing that her uncle, Edward VIII, did when he abdicated was to fly to Berlin and pay his respects to his political mentor, Adolf Hitler.

Steve Coleman

Sting in the Tail: By-election Fever (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

By-election Fever

The Scorpion has just suffered three by-elections on one night, it was a TV extravaganza where a load of toadies tried to get their snouts Into the Westminster trough.

"Its a good result for us", says Nigel Preservative. "It proves what we always said", says Hamish McSporran. "Another nail in the government's coffin” says Trevor Lickspittle. "Its the turn of the tide", says Walter Camera-Angle.

"Its the turning of my stomach", complains Scorpion, crawling off to bed suffering from an over-dose of cliches.

A Slap Up Meal

Should you happen to be in the London area on the night of February 13 and find yourself a bit peckish here is a bit of good news for you.

Instead of going to Joe's Greasy Eats Cafe for a salmonella sandwich, go a bit up-market and visit the Park Lane Hotel. It will be a splendid affair. You will be rubbing shoulders with famous politicians, writers and the odd film director.

This dazzling nlght-out can be yours for only £500-a-head. The organisers of this gala night out? None other than those champions of the proletariat — the Labour Party!

The Mad Professor

In the May issue we reported that Professor David Marsland had won the Margaret Thatcher Foundation annual award. This genius had won this great honour for such progressive ideas as abolishing social workers, ending unemployment benefit and recruiting 11 year old kids for defence training corps in schools.

Continuing the good work the Professor has turned his cool analytical mind to solving the civil war in Yugoslavia. Writing In the New Statesman (1 November 1991) the good professor proposes that Britain should go to war with Serbia!

"British aircraft flying from Cyprus and Austria could destroy the Serbian airforce and fleet in one day. Tanks and military formation could then be wiped out at leisure from the air without much difficulty. Within a week, Croatia and freedom could be saved."

This modern day Napoleon has a day job; he is a professor of social science at the West London Institute of Higher Education. Higher Education? Scorpion is just thankful he left school at 15!

Dry Eyed Farewell

The gloom of 1991 was lifted a little by the news that Marxism Today had ceased publication. Over the years it's Marxist content was probably slightly less than the Dandy or the Beano, so it was good to see another voice of confusion silenced.

BBC2 (5 December 1991) decided to mark the death of Martin Jacques' rag in The Late Show with a slot entitled the ABC of Marxism.

Naturally it was up to the usual high standard of The Late Show. C Is for Castro ... L is for Lenin ... the usual junk.

At P is for periodicals we saw flashes of various obscure left wing journals. Of course we did not see the Socialist Standard. This journal has been consistently putting a Marxist view for only 87 years, and we don't expect the terribly well informed BBC types to have a programme about Marxism that actually deals with Marxism.

Dim Stars

Hollywood is well described as "the dream factory" but it surpassed itself recently when Oxfam America staged the "Hollywood Hunger Banquet" to promote the plight of the world's hungry.

Movie stars Mel Gibson, Cybill Shepherd, Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, etc., drew lots for the privilege of sitting on the floor to eat just rice and water. The luckless losers had to make do with salad, chicken, dessert and wine.

One observer of this farce said:

It's a typical manifestation of these people's blind obsession with themselves —- as If they could actually make any real difference.

The Guardian 18 November

The banquet organiser hoped the event would show . . . "that there's totally unequal distribution of food In the world and capitalism isn't working". Well stated, but pulling stunts like this does nothing to reduce world hunger and leaves intact the loathsome system which spawns It.

Lenin — Some Guy

Bonfire night on the village common, families parading with Chinese lanterns behind a Guy destined for the flames, but what's this? The Guy is wearing a fur hat and brandishing a red flag!

Organisers of the village club's fireworks party had decided to give this year's celebrations a political theme and mark the fall of Communism In Eastern Europe by burning an old-style party leader.

Maidenhead Advertiser 8 November 

When Lenin scathingly earmarked capitalism for "the dustbin of history" he little dreamt that the mighty organisation which so slavishly worshipped him would itself become history to the extent that it could be burned In effigy as a stand-in for Guy Fawkes.

Vive La Difference

Many people insist that socialism means we would all have to conform while capitalism opposes this and encourages individuality.

The visit to Britain by Jean-Marie Le Pen gave us some examples of how capitalism opposes individuality.

The Guardian (6 December) quoted some Britons who share Le Pen's desire to repatriate coloured immigrants. One said 'The point is, they don't behave the way we behave”, while another deplored ” . . . the failure of immigrants to Integrate Into the customs of the host society”.

And look at the disapproval most people show when they see youngsters with purple hair or wearing "outlandish" clothes. What chance would someone have if he / she turned up for a job Interview dressed as a Punk-Rocker? Nor does the public exactly welcome the different sexual preferences of homosexuals.

The truth is that capitalism dislikes individuality and loves conformity.

Mitterrand wins again (1988)

From the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Buick

Letter From Europe: Racism and anti-racism in France (1985)

The Letter From Europe Column from the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

They seem to be everywhere. Posters in blue, white and red proclaiming "France and the French First". "Three million immigrants. Three million unemployed". “Halt to anti-French racism" and other such slogans and signed "le Front National".

The Front National is almost the exact equivalent on the French political scene of the National Front in Britain. Like the British organisation, its original members were a mixture of traditional conservatives and neo-Nazi lunatics. But, unlike the National Front, the Front National has, thanks to proportional representation, been able to overcome the credibility gap. Ten of the 81 French members of the European Parliament sit for the National Front and a solid phalanx of National Fronters are expected to be elected to the French National Assembly in next March’s general elections — ironically, thanks to the change over to proportional representation which the outgoing "socialist" government has decided to introduce as its only chance of avoiding utter defeat. Already the Front’s leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is regularly interviewed on news and current affairs programmes as an established national political leader.

Le Pen, an ex-Poujadist MP and paratroop officer, founded the National Front in 1972. For the first ten years his party was just one of a number of small competing extreme right-wing grouplets and in fact was unable to get enough signatures to present Le Pen as a candidate in the 1981 presidential elections. The breakthrough came in 1983 in the municipal elections when Le Pen himself was elected a municipal councillor for the 10th arrondissement of Paris, in the past a "communist" party stronghold, while in Dreux. an industrial town west of Paris with a high immigrant population, the National Front's list obtained 17 per cent of the votes, enough to go through to the second round. In the event the National Front and the traditional conservative opposition parties did a deal which resulted not only in the election of a number of National Front councillors but also in some of them being given municipal responsibilities.

Although the National Front claims to be a proper political party with a full range of policies on defence, Europe, law and order and so on. it is basically a one-issue organisation with a single crude political message: Arabs Go Home! Over the years there has been a considerable migration across the Mediterranean of workers from France’s ex-colonies in North Africa — Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia — to fill labouring and other lowly jobs in France. The figures show, however, that most migrants to France since the war have come from Southern Europe, from Portugal, Spain and Italy. But it remains true that the North Africans are the most conspicuous and, as Muslims, the most "alien” of recent migrants and as such the perfect scapegoats for an anti-immigrant party like the National Front.

Although the evidence seems to be that the National Front has expanded at the expense of the traditional conservative parties, the Gaullist RPR and ex-President Giscard’s UDF, it is clear that its rise has been a direct result of the failure of the reformist PS-PCF government that came to power in 1981. These parties had promised to end the economic crisis, to reduce unemployment and to improve the living standards of ordinary people. They did none of these things, basically because they are not within the government’s power to do: the capitalist economy works according to certain economic laws which demand in particular that priority be given to profit-making over popular consumption and governments, whatever their political colour, are in the end forced to comply with them. The PS-PCF government had learned this when, after only a year in office, they were compelled to impose a wage freeze. So not only were their promises not honoured but the crisis got worse, unemployment continued to rise steadily and living standards were reduced. This failure earned them the resentment, even the hatred, of large numbers of ordinary people which the National Front was able cleverly to exploit, blaming immigration and immigrants rather than the workings of capitalism for their continuing problems and worsened conditions. But since immigrant workers generally perform the most ill-paid jobs and live in the worst housing conditions it should be clear that they are fellow victims of capitalism rather than the cause of other workers' problems.

The government's reaction to the rise of the National Front has been to proclaim that it has been just as firm on immigration as the previous government and that it too is just as keen on tracking down "illegal immigrants''. In other words, to give in to anti-immigrant sentiment as a means of preserving votes which could make the difference between victory and defeat, especially at local level.

Mitterrand, who with his repeated wordy declarations on “human rights" must be a front-runner for the Nobel prize for hypocrisy. expressed the following sentiments in 1983 (at the time of the Dreux municipal election):

   Illegal immigrants must be sent back to their countries (Républicain Lorrain, 1 September 1983).
   I must protect the employment of French people . . . Illegal immigrant workers must therefore leave France (Le Monde, 17 September 1983).

Of course at the same time Mitterrand preaches that all human beings are equal, and that discrimination and racism are bad. but this does not alter the fact that the line between being "anti-immigration" (like him) and "anti-immigrant" (like Le Pen) is a thin one easily crossed in the minds of the politically ignorant electors who vote for one or other of the parties of capitalism, including his own PS and the PCF.

The French "Communist" Party, of course, is a past-master in this hypocritical game of behaving in a racist way without actually having to utter racist or anti-immigrant sentiments (the incident of the bulldozer sent by one of its mayors to demolish a hostel for African workers at Bitry in the South of Paris in December 1980 is not likely to be forgotten for a long while). There is also a very real sense in which the PCF helped to pave the way for the National Front. A widely-used PCF poster proclaimed "Produisons français" ("Produce French"), which the National Front capped with another reading "Produisons français. d'accord, mais avec des travailleurs français" ("Produce French, yes, but with French workers").

A more interesting reaction to the rise of the National Front than this, or the traditional Trotskyite policy of "Smash the Fascists" (which provided wonderful free publicity for the Front during the 1983 municipal and 1984 European elections), has been the campaign SOS Racism with its badge in the form of a hand proclaiming "Touche pas à mon pote" ("Hands Off My Mate"). Here the appeal has been not to violence but to people's common humanity.

This naive approach runs the risk of being exploited politically (and in fact the government has already begun to do so), but it has had a remarkable success. In schools in the big towns in particular, children whose parents came from various parts of Europe. Asia and Africa study and play together and therefore tend to know that racism is a load of nonsense. But then so is nationalism, and the logic of the argument "we're all human beings" should lead to the conclusion "and we have only one country: the world”. There is no automatic guarantee that this conclusion will in fact be drawn, but appealing to people as members of the same human race is a much more fruitful response to racism than shrill calls to use violence against misguided workers, who have imbibed racist nonsense. It at least allows a reasoned dialogue to take place, the only logical conclusion of which can be a recognition that world socialism is the only way to end racism and all other forms of oppression and discrimination.

Adam Buick,

Paris

The B team takes over (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

France’s conservative president, Chirac, called early elections in May and June in the hope of winning five more years in office for his supporters. The voters, however, refused to oblige and elected instead a left-wing government. Chirac remains president but has to cohabit with a government under a “Socialist" Prime Minister and with "Communist” and Green Party ministers.

Needless to say, the new Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, is no more a socialist than Mitterand was. His misnamed "Parti Socialiste” stands for a reformed capitalism not a society of common ownership and production for use not profit. Like the Labour Party in Britain, it is the B team to take over governing capitalism in France when the conservatives are tired or discredited.

Even so, the French PS fought the election on a programme that would have made Gordon Brown’s hair stand on end: increasing the minimum wage, reducing the existing 39-hour week to 35 hours with no loss of pay, 700.000 new jobs in the state and semi-state sector. In other words, unlike New Labour, which has got the message that such a reformist policy won’t work, the PS still believes—at least for vote-catching purposes—that a government can reduce unemployment by spending its way out of a slump.

A disturbing feature of the election was the vote for Le Pen’s Front National. It got 3.8 million votes, or 15 percent of those who voted, its highest ever score in a general election, even though—thanks to France’s two-round election system designed to ensure that MPs are representative of a majority of voters—it only got one seat. Since 38 million people aged 18 or over are eligible to vote in France, this means that one out of every ten French citizens voted for a party led by a fascist and open anti-semite.

As fascism is a reaction to the failure of democratic reformism to make capitalism work in the interests of the majority, where alienated workers mistakenly blame parliamentary democracy or some minority group instead of capitalism for their problems, this is a warning of the further dangers that could like ahead if workers continue to put their hopes in democratic reform of capitalism rather than socialism.

Some commentators have seen the election of the Jospin government as making a single European currency less likely. This is based on the assumption that the new government will honour its election promises and try to spend its way out of the crisis. This would indeed undermine the value of the franc and inaugurate a period of European monetary instability which would make the introduction of a single currency impossible.

The last time a French government tried to spend its way out of a slump was after Mitterand’s election as president in 1981. As we Socialists predicted, it was an utter failure because the capitalist economy is driven by profits, and the prospect of making them, not by government spending, which in the end is a charge on profits.

What happened was that the extra government spending was financed largely by inflating the currency. This undermined the competitiveness of French capitalist industry and led to three devaluations of the franc in an 18-month period. In the end, the austerity policy of the previous government was re-imposed, and tightened. It was one of the most spectacular failures of reformism in recent years.

If the Jospin government does adopt the same policy as in 1981 the commentators will be right. A more likely scenario, however, is the new government explaining that its election promises were only long-term goals, to be achieved within the framework of a united Europe, etc., etc., and carrying on with more or less the same economic policy as the previous government, as Blair and Brown are doing in Britain

Adam Buick

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

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of the article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attacks continue

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

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

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

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

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

Roots of racism

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

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

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

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

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

Peter E. Newell

The rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (1993)

From the February 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the majority of the world's people are to solve their basic problems of poverty, insecurity and general alienation, and achieve a society of equality, they will have to join together democratically, irrespective of nationality and so-called race, to bring it about.

One of their main tasks must he the elimination of national, ethnic and racial prejudices and hatreds. They will have to recognize their identity of interests.

Such recognition is not—and has never been—easy. Xenophobia, in varying degrees, has always existed within capitalist society. And racism, an ideology or system of beliefs which claims that one so-called race or ethnic group is inherently superior to another, has been a feature of our society for a very long time.

No-one needs reminding of the horrors of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s, for example.

Unfortunately, however, in recent times, particularly with the onset of economic recession and ever-increasing unemployment. ethnic and national hatreds have once again increased in many countries, often breaking out into bitter and bloody conflicts and civil wars. And in many countries. immigrant workers and. quite often, the children and even grandchildren of immigrants. have become scapegoats for economic ills, and have been erroneously blamed for causing unemployment or taking jobs and housing away from indigenous workers.

The flames of such conflicts and hatreds have, more often than not, been fanned by overtly Fascist and racist groups and parties; but also at times of economic recession and political crises, by mainstream, reformist parties of both left and right. 

France is a case in point.

Immigration

By the beginning of 1969. there were about three million immigrants in France, of whom two million were salaried workers. There were 700,000 Spaniards, 685,000 Italians and 300,000 Portuguese. Over the following ten years or so, most of these workers merged into the general working-class environment. And like the French, the majority are at least nominally Catholic. The situation with regard to the North Africans from Algeria. Morocco and Tunisia, has been, and still is, much different, as most are Moslems.

In the sixties, the governments of France, as in other Western European countries, together with many French employers, encouraged immigration. Indeed, immigrant labour was considered indispensable for the maintenance and development of activity in certain sectors of the economy, which at the time was booming. In April 1967, a report by the Office d'Immigration stated that:

immigration has contributed to getting our economy going and expanding. Jobs which no longer attract French people, or for which there were no applicants, have been taken up by foreigners without any difficulty arising among national workers.

Immigrant workers undertook the hardest, worst-paid, jobs, particularly in the car and building construction industries. As elsewhere, immigrants had to find, or accept, cheap apartments and houses near their places of work, which tended to become ghettoes, which in turn, placed a heavy burden on municipal schooling and some welfare facilities. This was considered acceptable at the time, though many French workers began to move out into the suburbs of the cities.

By 1975 the situation began to change. As in Britain and elsewhere, unemployment began, slowly at first, to increase. And French workers had to accept jobs they had hitherto refused. Often, they complained that immigrants had taken "their" jobs, as though the jobs were theirs by right. They also accused immigrant workers of taking their apartments—most of which were appalling slums, and didn't belong to the workers anyway.

So, by 1975, the French government, realizing that the "good times” of capitalist expansion were, at least for the foreseeable future, over, halted immigration. Shortly after, the government even offered the equivalent of £1,000 to any immigrant who volunteered to return to his or her country of origin. But there were few takers. Unemployment, particularly in Algeria, was (and still is) endemic. Even life in a Paris slum was preferable to an Algerian village or a worse slum in Algiers.

By the late 1970s. however, many immigrants began to be subjected to harassment. and worse. Surprisingly—or, perhaps, not—the first really nasty assault on immigrant workers was not organized by a far-right Fascist group, but by members and officials of the Parti Communiste Français, the French Communist Party. It was on Christmas Eve, 1980.

A hostel for 300 African workers from Mali had just been renovated in the Paris suburb of Vitry. an area with a Communist administration. The Communist mayor led a gang of PC heavies with a bulldozer and proceeded to smash the place up. making it uninhabitable. The doorways were blocked with earth, and the iron railings were torn up by the bulldozer. Gas, electricity and the central heating were cut off. The Communists had no intention of being outdone by the Fascists in pandering to the nationalist and racist prejudices of local French workers. Nor did the mayor intend to lose his job.

Far right

Following the upheavals of 1968 in France a number of small far-right groups began to emerge, such as the Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist and later the violent, hardline Nazi Fédération d'Action Nationale Européene (FANE), led by Marc Frederikson which has continued to exist under various names.

In Britain, the National Front was formed in 1967; in France, the Front National (FN) was not formed until 1972. Like the British NF, the French FN began life as an unholy mixture of hard-line Fascists, anti-immigrant racists and far-right conservatives, although unlike some of the pre-war far-right such as I'Action Française, the FN accepts the Republic and is not monarchist. It also attracted the support of many pieds noirs as former colonists from Algeria are known. The FN denies that it is a Fascist party, but it does display many of the trappings, symbols and attitudes of the pre-war Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot. Its undisputed leader is Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in a fisherman's cottage in the Brittany village of La Trinité-sur-Mer in 1928. His father was killed in the war, when his boat hit a German mine. As a student in Paris, in the 1950s, Le Pen was already a right-winger, leading gangs of students on demonstrations in the Latin Quarter against “commies” and “lefties”. After his student days, he briefly became a paratrooper, in the Foreign Legion, in Indo-China. Back in France, he became a supporter of Pierre Poujade's right-wing movement and, at 27, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as one of the movement's most turbulent deputies. He soon quarrelled with Poujade, however, and. tiring of parliament, enlisted in the French Army, and was sent to Algeria, where according to a police report he supervised the electric shock torture of at least one Algerian nationalist prisoner—which he denies (if Lieutenant Jean-Marie Le Pen didn't torture any Algerians, he must have been an exception to the rule!).

On his return to France, Le Pen again became involved in various small right-wing fringe groups, and subsequently lost an eye in a street brawl following a rally. For a number of years, he was regularly seen wearing a black eye patch, looking like a Hollywood pirate. After a while, he started up a small publishing business, but was later prosecuted, and fined, for “glorifying war crimes'' by selling a record album of Nazi songs. Jean-Marie Le Pen did, however, learn one lesson: he tried to keep within the law, and he tended to use innuendo rather than direct racist remarks. He was re-elected to parliament in 1958, as an independent, but lost his seat in 1962.

Soon after the formation of the Front National in 1972, the organization was rent by a number of violent internal feuds, and some of the hardline neo-Nazi elements broke way to form groups like FANE, leaving Le Pen in control. But he. his family, and his party were broke, and living on loans. Then, in 1976, fate was kind to Le Pen. Almost overnight he became a rich man.

On 25 September 1976, Hubert Lambert. a 42-year-old alcoholic and tranquillizer addict, who dreamed of becoming a Minister in a Front National government, died from cirrhosis of the liver. Le Pen eventually inherited a half of his £3 million fortune; and with his wife and his three daughters moved into the late millionaire's luxury villa in Saint Cloud. Le Pen dispensed with his black eye patch, and bought himself a brand new glass eye and some expensive suits. He also dyed his thinning, dark brown but greying, hair blond; and he acquired two black Dobermans.

Life for French, as well as Frances immigrant. workers was less satisfactory. And was to get worse. By 1980, ethnic tensions had increased considerably.

It was not until 1983 that FN electoral support began to take off, when a municipal by-election in Dreux. a town west of Paris where immigrants made up a quarter of the population, gave them four elected councillors with almost 27 percent of the vote. They had campaigned on a purely racist platform. In December Le Pen stood in a parliamentary by-election in the Brittany constituency of Morbihan. Although he received 50 percent of the vote in his home village of Trinité-sur-Mer, his overall vote was only 12 percent. Unlike in Dreux, he was not able to play the anti-immigrant card in Brittany.

In the 1984 elections to the European Parliament, the FN took 11 percent of the national vote and, as seats were allocated under a system of proportional representation, got 10 seats.

In the local, cantonal elections in March 1985, in which half the French electorate was eligible to vote, the Front National vote was only 8.7 percent nationally, although they increased their vote in the south of the country (to as much as 30.4 percent in Nice) and in some of the Paris suburbs. Nevertheless, in the first round the Front received one million votes. During and after the elections, there were a number of attacks on immigrants in both the south of the country, and in the Paris region. And throughout the year, racist and FN slogans could be seen all over Paris and the suburbs. Front slickers, “Votez Le Pen", were everywhere—and can still be seen in many places. Front National membership was almost 70,000. And increasing.

Le Pen now had a solid base for the General Election the following March. In the main, the Front's policies were, even by the usual standards of capitalist and reformist politics, vague yet populist. Except on immigration where, if anything, they had hardened, Front National policies had not changed much since 1978.

As a throwback to Poujadism, the FN called for “la liberté d’entreprendre” and opposition to the technocrats ”de la gauche". As an even farther throwback, to the wartime régime of Vichy, they called for measures to develop the family as the basic cell of French society. Resistance to "Marxism in our schools" was also high on the Front’s agenda. And another slogan during the election was: "Yes to work for young French people means No to immigration!". Always the main Front National slogan has been: "Lutter contre 1‘immigration”.

The Front entered the election with confidence. They considered the newly-introduced proportional representation to be in their favour. In the event, the FN received 2,705,838 votes, just on 10 percent of the votes cast. This gave them 34 members in the National Assembly (plus one sympathizer). And what a weird bunch many of the FN members of the National Assembly were! There was Edouard Dupont, aged 83, who had been an official in the collaborationist Vichy wartime government: there was former Captain Pierre Sergent. aged 60, who had led the OAS secret army in France, and had been condemned to death while on the run, but subsequently amnestied; there was Roland Gaucher, who had been a pro-Nazi youth leader during the German occupation. Another oddity was Pierre Ceyrac who, besides being a member of the Front National, was also a member of the Rev Moon's Unification Church. Ten other members had opposed Algerian independence. Six of them were lawyers, and one was a big landowner. All of them, however, pressed the new government of Jacques Chirac to set up a ministry to oversee the control, and deportation, of two million North African and black immigrants (this, presumably, included the children and even grandchildren of immigrants).

Meanwhile, racist gangs, including known FN members, as well as the police, continued to harass and physically attack immigrants or anyone with a “coloured” skin. At railway stations, and in suburban streets, police presence became ever more pervasive. Foreigners were sometimes held for days on end at police discretion and then secretly expelled from the country.

To be concluded. 

Peter E. Newell