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Elections: Organise a third round of anticapitalist resistance!

In historically high numbers (84%), the French voted last Sunday in the first round of the presidential elections. As expected, Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, candidates of the major parties, obtained a large score and went on to the second round, while the vote for the radical left is split between no less than 5 candidates!

However the campaign was far from being a passionate conflict, despite the high stakes. The reason is that all the major contenders openly espoused a neo-liberal ”solution” to France’s problems. Both Royal and Sarkozy insisted that they intend to break with the past and to move towards a new social model. The buzzword of change and reform came to mean more attacks against the working class, the youth and the immigrants. No wonder the traditional left electorate voted for Royal only because they consider her a lesser evil than Sarkozy.

Nicolas Sarkozy, neo-liberal hardliner who dreams of becoming France’s Thatcher, campaigned on the slogan “work more to earn more.” He threatened further attacks on the public services and workers rights. He tried to rally more votes by adopting extreme reactionary and racist slogans from Le Pen’s Front National. After serving many years as Minister of Interior, continually tub thumping about “law and order”; he is now proposing to create a Ministry of National Identity and Immigration. The very name suggests that immigration is putting in danger the French identity. Once again, immigrant workers are blamed for the capitalist plagues of unemployment, low salaries, lack of decent housing etc.

Segolene Royal, whose political models are Tony Blair and José Luis Zapatero, was particularly unconvincing, proposing a blend of a few weak social reforms in an overwhelmingly neo-liberal programme. One of her major theme was to “reconcile the French with the private companies”! To make this more palatable (in her opinion!) she added a strong pinch of nationalism, encouraging her supporters to sing the Marseillaise and to keep a tricolour in their homes, i.e. to espouse the anthem and banner of French Imperialism.

In this climate of consensus on the major political and economical questions, François Bayrou, whose economic program is indistinguishable from that of Sarkozy, denounced the establishment from the point of view of the petty bourgeoisie and obtained a large score (18%). His voters wanted to forget that he has been part and parcel of the right-wing politics since the seventies and served several time as minister. He could play a major role in the second round if he decided to rally Sarkozy or Royal.

Despite his historically low score of 11%, Le Pen, leading the reactionary Front National, represents a clear danger for the workers. While his campaign was less visible and vibrant than in the past his racist ideas have gained both an audience and additional credibility through Sarkozy’s adhesion to them. Once again, the danger is that the bosses and the capitalist state will be able to divide the working class using racist slander, in order to push forward the attacks the bourgeoisie is awaiting for years.

The radical left: division and confusion

Despite the resounding victory of the No vote in the EU constitution referendum, and more importantly the explosive waves of class struggle that rocked the country in the past years, the revolutionary left has been unable to build on this base and to use the campaign to build a strong resistance movement. Indeed the radical left approached the election divided and confused, with three “Trotskyist” candidates in addition to one from PCF and one from the anti-globalization movement. None of them was able to elaborate and stand on a clear revolutionary perspective for the workers.

Arlette Laguiller, candidate of the centrist Lutte Ouvriere, presented what in her own words is a programme “that has nothing of the revolutionary”. Indeed. It is a timid reformist program, forgetting the recent struggles and aimed at “restoring some equilibrium between the workers and the bosses”. The idiocy of the whole idea that you can have “equilibrium” between the two classes in a centuries-long combat shows the distance between LO and the reality of class struggle. One example is sufficient. While racism and racist repression against workers and youth is a central theme of this campaign, despite the riots in the banlieues and a militant movement to stop deportations, LO did not say a single word about it, limiting itself to economic demands.

The campaign of Olivier Besancenot, candidate of LCR, was also based on a reformist campaign, although a more combative and “left” one than that of LO, one which did relate to anti-racist struggles. This program is all what is left of two years of blind opportunism whereby LCR tried to put together an electoral front with reformist forces, most notably PCF. Having played an important role in the CPE movement, LCR meetings were extremely well attended throughout the country, attracting layers of combative youth. This is also reflected in his score (4.1%), significantly larger than that of Laguiller (1.34%) and even of Marie-Georges Buffet (1.94%) who stood for PCF. The candidate that some forces looked to as a unity candidate, the farmer Jose Bove, could muster only 1.32% of the vote. The Green party also achieved a lower vote than the Fourth International, Dominique Voynet received 1.5% of the vote, less than half of Besancenot.

While Buffet carefully avoided open references to the party she was representing, claiming that she was standing for the “gauche populaire and antilibérale”, voters clearly punished her party for decades of betrayals once in government. The frankly pathetic score of the PCF- given its sizable bureaucratic apparatus, its support in the trade unions, its still considerable numbers of mayors and councillors, is a warning of approaching death. The substantial a score for Olivier Besancenot indicates that despite the LCR’s luckless manoeuvres in 2006 a large section of the workers and youth who took the lead in the struggles against the Right are looking for a lead, an organisation. The decline of the PCF, the neoliberalisation of the SP, the struggles ahead with either Sarkozy or Royal clearly opens up an enormous political space for a vibrant new workers party.

A third round of struggle

However, the most encouraging signal from this campaign did not come from the meetings nor the results at the ballot box but from the streets, the working class districts, and the workplaces. In the last few months the class struggle was intense, despite attempts from the TU bureaucrats to respect the usual reformist “social truce” before elections.

The class struggle erupted in Gare du Nord, in the centre of Paris, were thousands of young people reacted against a brutal and racist arrest by the police and confronted the riot forces in a new urban riot. For hours, the police was unable to regain control of the station while projectiles of various nature, including 200 kg flower pots, pelted on them.

When police approached a primary school in Paris to arrest the grandfather of a child there, parents and teachers spontaneously reacted to stop what could have ended in another deportation. Few days later, 2 000 teachers went on strike in Paris in solidarity with their colleagues and to protest against the police brutal attacks.

All over the country, workers went on strike to defend their jobs and to demand wage increase. This happened with the EADS (Airbus) workers, threatened throughout Europe by the bosses’ Power-8 plan to close several plants. The Citroen Aulnay workers, led by LO activists, went on a marvellous strike lasting six weeks and demanding 300 € of wage increase. While they have not won, their strike, with the creation of active strike pickets, a strike committee, a strike newspaper, repeated action towards other workers, showed the level of combativity of the working class. All this contributed to put class struggle and social demands at the centre of the campaign. The fact that these numerous strikes couldn’t unify in a single campaign is due to the deliberate passivity of the TU bureaucrats and the political inadequacy of the centrists groups’ politics.

This combativity represents an excellent basis to organize the resistance against the attacks that will follow the second round. Both Sarkozy and Royal have clearly indicated that they will attack the working class, the public sector workers, workers right. For instance, one of the measures proposed by Royal is a new type of contract for young workers. One year after the mighty struggle against CPE, this sounds like a provocation and shows, together with the rest of Royal program, that she will obediently follow the bosses wishes.

Royal no “lesser evil”

Revolutionaries should not share the illusions that Royal will be a lesser evil than Sarkozy. Certainly the latter’s outspokenness has rung the alarm bells for workers, youth and the inhabinats of the banlieues. One young banlieue youth was reported in Libération as saying, “If it’s Sarko on the 6 May it will be war.” The Royal campaign is on the contrary geared to obtaining the maximum consensus from workers to best impose on them her neo-liberal program. Her attacks on the public services are more disguised but in delivering them she will have the support of the trade union bureaucracy, or at the least no effective opposition from them. The enemy from within our movement, who persuades us to surrender or who splits our forces, is just a dangerous as the open enemy.

All the left candidates have now called for a vote for Royal. They are wrongly holding out hopes that she will turn left or that friendly criticism will make her do so. Most workers will undoubtedly rally behind her at the ballot box in order to stop Sarkozy, though few have illusions that an SP government will substantially improve their conditions. Since the reactionary constitution of the Fifth Republic prevents the vanguard from maintaining a candidate in the second round, able to expose Royal as well as Sarkozy, revolutionaries should call for a critical vote for her.

The Socialist Party remains, despite its rightwards neoliberal evolution, what Lenin called a bourgeois workers party: with a bourgeois programme but with roots in the organised workers movement. Workers should put hard and clear demands to her and the Socialist Party during the campaigning for the second round, focussing on all the key issues: defence of public services, the 35 hour week, citizenship rights for immigrants, unemployment, housing the immediate abolition of the CPE and all cheap labour schemes. That way her real intentions may be more clearly exposed and the need to fight her neoliberalism more quickly recognised. Should she win the same method should be applied.

Revolutionaries should say to the overwhelming majority of workers: we have no political confidence in Royal whatsoever but we will vote together with you in the second round to put her to the test of office, precisely to expose her as no better than Sarkozy, to convince you that a new, revolutionary party is needed in France as elsewhere. At the same time we warn the workers of the impending attacks – whether from Sarkozy or Royal – and help prepare the resistance against it.

The best way to do this is to argue for all workers organisations to adopt an action programme, with simple and urgent demands linked to the most effective ways to organize, including they way to prevent the union bureaucrats’ sabotage. In short the self-organisation and democratic control by coordinations of workers and young people over the own movement of resistance is a vital part of this program.

The traditional reformist parties are increasingly distancing themselves from the working class and becoming discredited in the eyes of the workers. As the numerous strike waves by public sector workers, as the revolt in the banlieues and the anti-CPE movement showed, there is a great willingness to fight back, to defend workers gains. Workers want to defend the health service and the other social services, public education and transport as well as the 35 hour week. But in addition they want to rid France of the scourge of double figure structural unemployment which hits the young, the immigrants the hardest.

Yet at the same time as the outcome of most of the struggles of the last few years showed there is no decisive leadership either from the parties or the trade unions. Worse, all too often the leaders betray and demobilise the struggle at the critical moment, usually because they believe the question of power can and must only be decided at the ballot box, not on the streets or in the workplaces.

There is, in short, a terrific crisis of political leadership that can only be resolved by creating a new party. None of the larger far left groups are responding to this challenge. They either mark time, for decade after decade, as a sect on the sidelines of the class struggle like Lutte Ouvriere, or like the LCR, time after time they try to stitch together opportunist blocks on a reformist platform. Such was the ill-fated “unitary candidacy” of last year.

Yet there is an alternative to these bankrupt methods. It is to rally forces in the trade unions, the youth and immigrant organisations, to the project of a new mass working class party – one which will give leadership in the factories and on the streets, first and foremost. One that will use the elections to measure the support for its own programme, to rally new fighters to its ranks, not one that trims its programme to anything it believes will gain the largest number of votes.

Besancenot said in his post-election speech

“We need a new anti-capitalist force, to be useful as we have been for the last five years in the struggles and resistances, based on the new political generation who emerges after the mobilizations against the CPE [contrat première embauche, first employment contract], in banlieues and inside companies. The LCR proposes to you to build together this force that is capable of fighting capitalism and offering the hope that another world is possible.”

The L5I agrees that the vote for the LCR and the struggle against the neo liberal project in France offers real opportunities to create a new political force. For us this force must be no less than a new party of the working class.

The LCR with 1.49 million votes (4.11% Le Monde 24 April) behind them and their PCF and ‘far left’ rivals discomfited, are well placed to launch such a call. It should involve meetings in every town and city to discuss what sort of party we need. It could act straightaway as a rallying point for resistance to Sarkozy or Royal. They should do so now! The response could be massive from the militants who took part in the struggles of the last years, many of whom will have voted for Olivier Besancenot.

We believe that this campaign must not make the same mistakes as were made in the campaign for a ‘unitary candidate’ last year, negotiating with the leaders of the parties and seeking out the lowest common denominator to unite the left. We believe that revolutionaries should fight for a new party to be founded on a revolutionary programme and for the new party to be a section of an a new international party of socialist revolution. We believe that this must be a Fifth International to fight capitalist globalisation and imperialist war.

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