Last week, the two principal French Trotskyist organisations, Lutte Ouvrière and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, agreed to have joint lists in next year’s Regional and European elections. This produced alarmist articles in the world’s press as editorialists and journalists fretted over the idea that revolutionary politics might be a viable option for the French electorate.
On one level, the journalistic excitement is difficult to explain. For a start, this is hardly a new development. The last time the Regional and European elections took place – 1998 and 1998, respectively – there were also joint LO-LCR lists. The results, while impressive for organisations that are seen as being revolutionary, hardly made the bourgeoisie quake in its collective boots: a few dozen regional councillors and five euro-MPs.
Furthermore, the joint programme was hardly the stuff to mobilise the masses, either – the usual mixture of vague references to the destruction of capitalism, and a set of left-reformist demands, with no connection between the two. The need for working-class action, for workers’ control as the key to defending workers’ interests and destroying capitalism, was deliberately excluded from a programme that both organisations were happy to shape to meet the left-reformist prejudices of some layers of French workers.
However, 2003 is not 1998 or 1999. This time round, the vote for a joint LO and LCR list could do far better than getting a few consolation seats. Opinion polls that suggested that up to one third of the French electorate might vote for the LO-LCR lists.
If this was to happen, LO-LCR would get around 25 Euro-deputies, and in the regional elections would gain large numbers of seats, probably holding the balance of power in many of the extremely powerful regional assemblies. Coupled with the potential growth of Le Pen’s Front National, this could paralyse many regions through a four-way second round of voting and stalemate in the assemblies.
Although the politics of both LO and the LCR are fundamentally the same as in the last century (although the LCR has changed its figurehead, exchanging veteran 68-er Alain Krivine for Olivier Besancenot, a dynamic young postman), the relation of the French working class to politics has changed substantially over the last few years.
The decline in its two traditional parties – the Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party (PCF) – has reached new depths. The last sign of this was in Spring 2002, in the first round of the Presidential elections: the PCF was easily beaten by the joint score of LO and the LCR’s separate candidates, while the PS saw its candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, pushed into third place and out of public life.
Both parties have continued to head for oblivion. The PCF, which can no longer rely on its two historic allies – the Soviet bureaucracy and the CGT trade union, one former being dead the latting having broken the historic link between the two organisations – has virtually become an irrelevance, the fifth wheel on the carriage of the PS.
The PCF now controls no more than a handful of working-class town halls and even in its once might-bastion – what was the “red belt” around Paris – it cannot present a united face. It is now faced with a decisive and potentially fatal choice: either join forces with the PS and save its seats but lose its base, or go it alone, lose its seats and perhaps save a small part of its support.
The PS, which enjoys far greater electoral support and has a far more substantial control of local and regional government, continues to be leaderless, drifting rudderless following the Jospin’s withdrawal from politics in the wake of his humiliating failure in 2002.
The PS is generally correctly seen as a technocratic party which puts the interests of the bosses before those of the working class. Even its flagship « reforms », such as the 35 hour week, were implemented in order to aid French capitalism (in this case by subsidising the bosses and by increasing the flexibility of the working week), and at the expense of workers’ conditions of work.
As the 2002 Presidential election showed, the PS can no longer rely on the support of an important part of the population. Growing numbers of people are attracted to a discourse that apparently puts workers first, and they are prepared to show it, at least electorally. They may not agree with, or even know much about, the politics of LO and the LCR, but they know they hate the PCF, the PS and the bosses.
Above all, in the earlier part of this year these same workers showed their rejection of the traditional paths of reformism on the streets, through the massive wave of strike action against the government’s “reform” of the pension system and its attacks on teachers.
That explains why press rooms round the world started to panic last weekend. Neither the politicians nor the commentators think that revolution is on the cards in France. The unexpectedly “cool” autumn, following the tumult of the class struggle earlier in the year, shows that they are, sadly, right for the moment.
But there is the very real possibility that a key weapon in the hands of the bosses – the existence of mass pro-capitalist workers’ parties that can safely channel working-class dissent into the electoral arena – may have begun to fail.
The situation in France is rich in potential for workers and youth. In particular, there is the real possibility that a new mass workers’ party could be built, on democratic bases, rooted in the workplaces, communities and the class struggle, which could challenge the French bosses not only at the ballot-booth but above all in the class struggle.
In this respect, the LO-LCR agreement is to be welcomed and it seems probable that, in the absence of any list based on workers’ struggles and regrouping important sections of the working class vanguard, revolutionaries in France would call for a vote for this list.
However, everything about the history of LO and the LCR suggests they are not up to meeting the challenge of French 21st century politics. Both remain firmly rooted in the post-war world which saw them emerge, waiting for a never-to-be split of important sections of the PCF while the PCF itself slowly dwindles into nothingness. Neither LO nor the LCR realise that their Godot is dead.
LO’s fatally debilitating mixture of passivity and sectarianism transforms all that it touches into lead. In 1995, following their (then) record-breaking score of 5% at the Presidential elections, they called for a new workers party and organised meetings around the country, collected signatures etc, before their semi-clandestine apparatus grew too fearful and called the whole thing off, declaring to have been “merely propaganda, of course”. Their pathetic conservative reflex was met a mixture of laughter and tears.
The LCR, who have a more outgoing opportunism and have recently grown substantially (unlike LO), have a better track record in terms of building united front structures in the working class. However, their orientation is fundamentally towards the remnants of the PCF and their entourage. Their actions in and around the ESF in which they have consistently backed the now-Stalinist leadership of Attac demonstrate this.
Furthermore, the 80% majority of the LCR’s conference in favour of the alliance with LO was above all a vote of convenience: all factions are aware that this is the best way of getting seats, irrespective of their general disdain for LO and its posturing “orthodoxy”. The same, of course, is true of LO, who are prepared to swallow their correct criticisms of the LCR for voting Chirac against Le Pen in 2002, and their paper-thin “orthodox” dismissal of the LCR’s thoroughly worked-out opportunist orientations, simply for the sake of getting some more seats.
There is no sign whatsoever that either organisation is doing anything else than pursuing business as usual, mixing internal and external manoeuvring with a growing appetite for purely electoral interventions.
In other words, it will take more than a decision on the part of either LO or the LCR to fundamentally change the situation in France. Only the working class itself can push the ingrained factional interests and sclerotic political methods of these two organisations into the background.
The decisive intervention of workers in action will also highlight the complete inadequacy of the programme put forward by LO and the LCR, and the need for a revolutionary action programme, based on workers’ action and workers’ control. Only such a programme could provide any new workers’ party with a content appropriate to its weight and potential influence in society, charting the road from protest to power.