In Paris on June 24th and 25th a conference of around 200 activists from around Europe gathered to discuss the victory of the French Non and the Dutch No campaigns in referendums on the draft European Constitution.
The constitution seems as dead as the proverbial parrot, even though there is a referendum in Luxembourg on July 10th. But it would be unwise indeed to imagine that Europe’s rulers will abandon their plans to “Americanise” the European Union in order to become an effective economic and eventually military counterweight to the transatlantic colossus that presently bestrides the world.
Nevertheless the French Non victory has thrown the ruling classes of the major states at each others throats, with Chirac raising one monstrous subsidy –the so-called British rebate- and Blair the equally monstrous French subsidy the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) . Blair is trying to use the British presidency to grab the leadership of the neoliberalisation drive away from Chirac and Schroeder. So after Blair’s arrogant aggressive Brussels speech, setting out the neoliberal stall for his presidency, a discussion of where the European anti-neoliberal forces should go was indeed timely.
The call for the conference came from the organisers of the French referendum campaign ,the Appeal of the 200. Elisabeth Gautier of Espaces Marx and Michel Rousseau of the Marches européennes contre le chômage issued invitations to organisation and individuals to attend a two day conference in Paris. In essence the French Non movement is dominated by Attac, the LCR and the French Communist Party, with the unions and some sections of the Socialist Party.
It appears the PCF and the LCR rather jumped the gun on Attac and that the latter were not best pleased, according to the report back given by German Attac members. They saw it as an attempt to escape from the WSF-ESF Porto Alegre principles which force parties to don the disguise of social movements in order to participate. In the ESF, the LCR and the PCF are obliged to appear as a series of cultural/educational campaigns: such as the Fondation Copernic, Espaces Marx, or as individual leaders of unions (G10, CGT) or campaigns (euromarches).
Here, for two days, the masks were off. This was underlined by the fact that it was held at the French Communist Party’s huge classic modernist headquarters at Place Colonel Fabien. The main forces there from France were the PCF itself, the LCR (French section of the Fourth International), and of course Attac–France. There were however quite a sprinkling of the Non wing of the French Socialist Party, some deputies in the French and European parliaments.
About half the people attending came from 19 other European countries. Representatives from other European Attac groups were plentiful plus official representatives from the German PDS, Italian Rifondazione Comunista, the Greek Synaspismos and even a brief appearance, rather like the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty, of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) which condemns the whole ESF as a tool of imperialism. There were sizable delegations from Germany, Holland, Belgium, the Spanish state, Greece and Italy plus representatives from Austria and Eastern Europe, including Romania Hungary and Macedonia .
On the union front there were representatives of G10 Solidaires, the CGT, Cobas, IG Metall and the Macdonian metalworkers union.
But only a tiny handful came from Britain – including one representative apiece of the Communist Party of Britain, of the CPGB-Weekly Worker and Workers Power. For the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the London Mayoral SA bureaucracy it was clearly a question, despite it being June, of “fog in the channel- continent cut off.”
The introduction was given by Yves Salesse president of the Fondation Copernic, on the theme that the French Non had been a progressive , internationalist campaign aimed entirely against neoliberalism, not at Europe as such let alone at Turkey’s entry as the media tried to claim. He stressed that it had provided a powerful dynamic of unity within a divided French left and had, consequently, attracted a large extra number of people going well beyond the normal bounds of the left parties and their periphery.
He admitted that he never imagined that over a thousand local organisation would have sprung up across the country and that their meetings would be so large and so participatory. He claimed that the Non was the first real political victory over the neoliberal project, that it had thrown the European rulers into chaos, but that Blair had taken advantage of this to try to pressure the EU into an even more Anglo-Saxon neoliberal direction. His suggestion was that to meet the aspirations of the majority who voted no the victory at the ballot box had to be followed up by further victories on selected concrete issues like the Bolkestein directive, the European working time directives, the Chirac-Villepin “100 days” plan to privatise or semi-privatise public services, like the rail system in France. Secondly he emphasised the need to develop on a European level, a positive alternative to European neoliberalism, putting forward measures for economic recovery, democratic reform of the EU, refoundation of a social Europe.
Speakers from Attac – Europe reported on their conference held on 16th June in Brussels. This had issued a call — whose name is obviously taken from Chirac and Schroeder’s claim during the referendum campaign that “there is no plan B”. Attac is calling for plans A B and C: i.e. for short middle and long term alternatives to a neoliberal EU.
Plan A includes ten immediate proposals, amongst which figure, withdrawal of the Bolkestein directives, the alteration of the European Central Bank’s monetary policy and interest rates, plus the increase of the EU budget to deal with unemployment in the old states and meeting the needs of the new accession countries. It also calls for the withdrawal of all EU troops from Iraq. How to achieve what amounts to the end of neoliberalism and a return to Keynesian pump priming? “A series of actions reaching a climax in Brussels in December 2005.”
One such idea is to get a million signatures on a petition for the withdrawal of the Bolkestein directive another is a demonstration on December 15th against the EU summit in Brussels, yet another a day of assemblies and social forums in every country on March 4th 2006, preparing for the Athens European Social Forum in April. Their idea is to adopt there an Athens Agenda to set against the Lisbon Agenda.
Plan B is a call for longer term democratization process for the European Union including giving, at one and the same time, more powers back to the national parliaments and more power to the European parliament: stripping the powers from the Council of heads of and the Commission. Plan C is “the birth of a vast democratic workshop to build an alternative to neoliberal Europe”.
Attac always presents neoliberalism (not capitalism or imperialism) and the offensive of our rulers to impose it as just a policy option that a campaign of mass public education, of peaceful popular mobilization on the streets, and ultimately election of reformist parties won to its recipes as the way to achieve their reformist utopia. Class, the class struggle, the struggle for power are old hat- the failed struggle of the twentieth century. In a series of essays collected in the magazine Contretemps Sept 20004, key members of Attac’s “scientific council” an leaders like Pierre Khalfa and Phillippe Corcoff say so quite blatantly. Khalfa, who is also a leader of G10 Solidaires, contrasts the old near defunct workers movement with the new altermondialist movement :
“In Contrast to the workers movement it is not a question of a class movement but a movement denominating itself as a “citizen”, one which wishes to represent the whole of society. This can be explained first of all by the historic defeat of the workers movement which the collapse of the USSR brought to light”. He goes on to say that not only did the working class suffer considerable social defeats in this period but these were “accompanied by a profound crisis of the project of social transformation.” “The workers movement appeared defeated not only socially but ideologically. The altermondialist movement will build itself on a new basis.”
Not so new. In fact very old. The people, the populist, the classless (bourgeois) social republic all this dates back to the nineteenth century and was criticised mercilessly by Marx and Engels, let alone in the twentieth century by Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Kalfa’s tradition too is a long one : Louis Blanc, Eduard Bernstein, the British Fabians and the heroes of the Rassemblement populaire. In fact the whole method of Attac is immensely suggestive of that of the pre-1914 Fabian society, which as Trotsky observed specialised in taking the ideological backbone out of working class politics.
But doubtless the French referendum has put wind in the sails of this reformist utopia for the moment. True some of Attac’s concrete suggestions for the ESF— the demonstration in Brussels in mid-December, the local and national social forums meeting across Europe on March 4th, the long delayed debate on what is this “other Europe” every body keeps talking about, would be limited steps forward from the paralysis that has gripped the ESF since the London Forum. They would provide a framework, indeed an arena in which all those committed to the working class and its emancipatory struggle can take on this pre-twentieth century altermondialist mush and expose it for what it is— a post-modernist capitulation to capitalism and imperialism.
One Greek representative pointed out that one of the big successes of neoliberalism was having purged the vocabulary of ESF declarations of all class terminology and combative expressions. It was indicative that not a word was said about the G8 mobilisation in Scotland, scarcely a word about the cancellation of the debt of the global South and that the original draft declaration did not mention the war and occupation of Iraq or Palestine. In these ways this was a deeply insular meeting.
There can be no serious step forward for the international movement against corporate globalisation and the so-called new imperialism unless real actions are taken to repel the European governments offensive on jobs, insecurity and pensions. De Villepin has declared “a hundred days” of decisive action, starting now. The French unions, the thousand local committees of the Non, face a real struggle here and now. In fact if they go all out to defeat this attack then Chirac and his new prime minister can end their hundred days, just like Napoleon, with a disastrous Waterloo. French workers and young people have shown that they can do it, even if all to often their leaders let their enemies off the hook at the decisive moment.
Then, whatever the doctrinaire neo-Fabians of Attac think, the question of government, the question of who rules, who should rule, will be posed in the sharpest possible manner. A similar situation could also develop very quickly after the German general election: and in Italy too the Berlusconi government stands on shaky legs. The confusion and divisions of our enemas are out opportunity. Will these international gatherings of the left wing of the workers and anticapitalist movement face up to their duties to inspire and coordinate a pan European fightback on the streets and in the workplaces, in the schools and in the colleges. What we need is not a charter for a social and democratic European Union but an action programme for the European revolution, whose goal must be a Socialist United States of Europe.
There was practically no discussion of struggle in Paris, just as the same forces did their best to smother it in Prague. It must be addressed in Istanbul in September and through to the Athens ESF next year. Indeed in Greece and Turkey where important and unashamedly anticapitalist forces have not given up on the working class a left wing must be rallied to fight the neo-reformist and populist right wing that is trying to strangle the movement. This left wing must be committed to the class struggle, not afraid of political organisation, of talking about the need to struggle for power about the need for a Fifth International to lead and coordinate that struggle.