The presidential elections are now well underway in France. The neoliberal candidates of the liberals, socialists and Gaulists are well ahead in the polls. The candidate of the French far left grouping the League Communist Revolutionaire (LCR) Olivier Besancenot has however won the 500 mayoral signatures he needs to make it on to the ballot paper. Amongst the European Left there is a great deal of discourse as to whether LCR standing him has been ‘sectarian’ as four other candidates to the left of social democracy will also contest the elections. In this extended article on the elections and the Besancenot candidacy Dave Stockton argues that it is the timidity the LCR has shown in the great social struggles of the last decade that has led to them failing to organize the working class vanguard into a revolutionary party. In the coming elections militants should campaign for the Besancenot vote, as the candidate that is most identified with the social struggles, however, in doing so they must also fight for a principled, revolutionary strategy that may point the way out of the current impasse
How the candidates square up
The race for President in the April-May elections has begun in France and Nicolas Sarkozy is in the lead. According to an opinion poll (Ipsos) released on March 17 26 per cent of respondents would vote for the candidate of the centre right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party (PS) is tailing him with 24 per cent.
Royal is closely followed by François Bayrou of the centre-left Union for French Democracy (UDF) with 22.5 per cent. The old fascist war horse, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front (FN) is at 14 per cent but opinion polls routinely underestimate his support by several percentage points. The first round takes place on April 22nd.
The position of the left is much weaker. Marie-George Buffet of the once powerful French Communist Party (PCF) stands at just 2 per cent – below the “Trotskyists” Olivier Besancenot of the Ligue Communiste révolutionaire (LCR) and Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere (LO) who have 3 per cent apiece. Anticapitalist activist and farmer José Bové has 2%, Dominique Voynet of the Greens (Verts) has 1.5 per cent and Gérard Schivardi of the Parti des Travailleurs (PT, the ‘Lambertists’) has 0.5 per cent.
Sarkosy: France’s Thatcher?
Nicolas Sarkozy, currently minister of the Interior, is the man who has triggered the uprising in the banlieues in 2005. First he openly insulted the youth of these neighborhoods by calling them “scum” and saying they needed to be scoured away with a high-pressure hose. Then he openly lied in about the deaths of two youths from an immigrant background, Ziad and Buna, who were electrocuted in a transformer station they had climbed into in order to escape from the police.
Far from being a slip, all this was part of a carefully prepared plan. In so doing, Sarkozy was openly courting the racist voters of the Front National of Jean Marie Le Pen . He has since continued on this racist line, stepping up deportations of immigrants and asylum seekers, including whole families, meeting the sinister quota of 20,000 in 2006 alone.
At a 10,000 strong election rally in Caen (Normandy) Sarkozy promised, if elected, to create a “ministry of immigration and national identity” to keep out even more immigrants and force those allowed in to integrate into French ‘traditions, language and culture’. In his speech he used the words “France” and “French” 200 times hammering away at the theme of the unity of France:
“France is a miracle…. It is France’s miracle to combine such a strong identity with such a great aspiration to universalism…a mysterious interweaving…a mysterious bond…. The Republic has accomplished the ancient dream of the kings. It has made us a nation one and indivisible.”
Don’t be fooled by the lashings of liberal republican rhetoric mixed in with his nationalism, for Sarkosy’s attacks on France’s Muslim population are pure racism hidden under a thin veneer of laicité (secularism), as he quickly made clear:
“A person who enters France illegally, a person who makes no attempt to integrate, that person should not expect to have the same rights as a French person…. I want undocumented immigrants to be excluded from the legal right to be housed. I want an immigrant who is legally resident not to be able to bring his family over, unless, prior to entering our territory, that family has learnt to speak French and we are sure that the income from his work enables him to look after it and house it decently.” (Our emphasis – yes this was a reference to those legally in France!)
Sarkozy’s proposals for the economy meet all the neoliberal demands of the bosses federation Medef: less taxes for companies and the rich, reduced public services, attacks on workers rights including limitations on the right to strike, a legal obligation on public sector workers to run a “minimum service” during a dispute and a compulsory ballot of the whole workforce. Sarkozy sees himself as the man to “do a Thatcher“ on the French labour movement – particularly the powerful public sector.
A social democratic alternative? Not a chance
Ségolène Royal, designated candidate of PS after an overwhelming vote by the party members in November, would like to appear as a ”new” face, not one of the old party bureaucrats. This is a downright lie: she has been a minister three times, starting as a member of Mitterrand’s cabinet in the eighties. However, she deftly uses all the techniques of media marketing and has succeeded in creating around herself an appearance of popularity quite detached from the mood of French workers.
Part of this status as a media darling is due to the fact that she has no clearly expressed programme of her own. Instead, she flatters the voters with trendy but meaningless formulae like “participative democracy”, asking for policy contributions from citizens at large in well-selected meetings, telling them that they are all “legitimate experts” and pledging that she will “listen [to them in order to] to act right”. In the honey moon period of Blair’s regime in Britain – a distant memory now – such talk of ‘open government’ and ‘citizen participation’ was on show and just as politically empty.
Royal has two themes: the need to win France to support for a modern enterprise society and law and order. “We have to reconcile the French people with enterprise,” she has claimed, echoing the bosses’ propaganda that France needs to adopt the business-friendly Anglo-Saxon model. Of course, she links this with lip service to political and social justice, but with the implication that this is only possible if people accept the marketisation as quid pro-quo. Thus, her program has a very strong right-wing bias in comparison to former Socialist Party candidates when they were first running for office.
Like, Sarkosy she openly talks about her admiration for Tony Blair. This is a clear signal that she will push even further than Jospin did the break with old style “tax-and-spend” social democracy and towards a more naked neo-liberalism. To this she adds a strong touch of nationalism, of total loyalty to the French state. For example:
“The tricolour flag and social security, this is what binds together our common belonging. Because here, the national and the social march together, and it is the state that guarantees this alliance”.
Clearly, Mme Royal has nothing to offer to French workers. She doe not even promise meaningful social reforms to those who opposed the attacks against the public services, on workers rights and pensions. Her “participative democracy” is just a demagogic cover for a new series of attacks against the working class, forcing it to adapt even more to the needs of the bosses: The simple meaning of this is work harder for a lower wage and with less social rights.
Her second major theme is what she calls “just order “ or “just authority”. This is also borrowed from the Blairite “tough on crime” agenda, i.e. to try to outbid the conservative right on it’s historic terrain. This is summarized in her concept of “just order” targeted especially at rebellious youth. For instance, she proposed creating new jails for young “delinquents”, run by the army (sic), so that they can “regain their self-esteem.” Shades of the US “Boot Camps!” Likewise, she argued, the social welfare entitlements of their families should be cut off to teach responsibility to such failing parents.
François Bayrou for the UDF is clearly competing with Royal for the centre ground, making clear he is not a hard neoliberal and claiming to protect the French social model. Recently he stated “I think that France has its own project for society and that this project cannot be lifted from those of another (country). In France we should not try and copy any other political model whatsoever. We have our own project and our own values.” The “other countries” he means are the Anglo-Saxon ones. Perhaps, it is his down to earth manner, in contrast to Royal’s media fakery, that has led to him gaining ground in the election. In any case, Bayrou, is not to be believed, he will deliver the same neoliberal medicine French capitalism so desperately wants just like the big mainstream candidates.
And what of the Left?
After the debacle of the Unitary Candidature, covered in the article of Marco Lasalle , the LCR decided to push on with an Olivier Besancenot candidacy. However, it faced serious problems. Every candidate has to be supported by at least five hundred mayors or regional councilors. 16 March was the deadline for sending in the endorsements and surprisingly Oliver managed to get 530 signatures a few days before the deadline. Lutte Ouvriere – who never toyed with a unitary candidate, has been campaigning solidly over the last year to get the requisite signatures for Arlette Laguiller and did so easily.
Olivier Besancenot’s program concentrates on a series of immediate demands most of them fine in themselves. It calls for permanent contracts for all, an end to flexible working and overtime, a general wage increase of 300 euros to restore purchasing power, a minimum wage (SMIC) of 1500 euros take home per month. It includes the shortening the working week immediately to 32 hours and then to 30, finding a job for everybody, taxing rich shareholders and inherited fortunes, re-evaluating women’s wages to ensure equality of income and opportunity to work throughout life. It includes retirement after 37.5 years work or at 60 and pension rights at 75% of final salary.
It calls for renationalisation of privatized forms and services and abrogation of neoliberal reforms in the health service and education, grants for pupils and students to enable them to live an independent life, full citizenship rights for immigrants and documents for the sans papiers. In the economic sphere it calls for the expropriation by the state of any firms that close down and try to relocate at home or abroad, it calls for the abolition of VAT and the cessation of payments on the public debt. In the political sphere it calls for the abolition of the Senate, the “monarchical powers of the presidency” and the calling of a Constituent Assembly to replace the Gaullist Fifth Republic.
Where it is totally silent is on how to fight for these excellent demands, given Olivier will not win the election and even if he did would not be able to decree or legislate such a programme by “normal democratic means”. For example, the struggle against unemployment should indeed be based upon a ”prohibition of sackings” but who will prohibit them and how is not included in this programme. Is it the workers themselves, by occupying the factory, imposing workers control and moving on through a workers government to expropriate the bosses? Or is it simply a law voted by parliament? And what actions are needed to install a workers government? We can agree on the need to get rid of the Gaullist Fifth Republic, etc, but what sort of Republic will replace them- capitalist Republics like the First to the Fourth or a workers republic based on democratic councils?
Whilst Olivier claims his programme is “anticapitalist” the revolutionary struggle necessary to i) expropriate the capitalists, ii) create a socialized and planned economy and to iii) smash the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state is entirely absent from his programme. In fact, this programme is practically indistinguishable from a left reformist, a very left reformist programme to be sure, but not a revolutionary program. Nor for that matter, despite being referred to as an emergency programme, does it constitute an action programme, i.e. a series of key measures and how the unions, the youth, the immigrant communities, women, should organise and fight for them
LCR: a method to their madness?
Daniel Bensaïd, the leading theorist of the LCR, has recently come up with a rationale for the LCR’s failure in the unity manoeuvres of the past years and an alibi in advance for Olivier and the other “far left”candidates likely weak score compared to 2002 – when the LCR and LO together got around 11 per cent.
Bensaïd’s latest proclamations come on top of his revision of the Marxist theory of the state we critiqued in February – Daniel Bensaid and the ‘Return of Strategy’ .
In his latest outpourings Bensaïd offers the following excuses –
“In 2002, the left (…) fully fulfilled its electoral potential, which I estimate at 10%-13%. It was a vote punishing a socialist legislature that hadn’t changed much in social policy, nor in Europe, and which had spectacularly rallied to privatisation. Today, the electoral reflex is not the same. We have had a rightwing government and the fear of a new presence of Le Pen in the second round favours the idea of the useful vote from the first round.” (International Viewpoint; February 2007 – “The Presidential campaign is rotting French political life” and interview with Daniel Bensaïd)
Bensaïd then goes on to unload the blame for this “rotting political life” onto the defeats suffered by the working class four years ago:
“I think, moreover, that the demoralising effect of the defeat of the social movement of 2003 on pensions and education is underestimated. It was a struggle much more rooted than that against the First Employment Contract (CPE-ed.), of which nearly nothing remains twelve months later.” (ibid)
Bensaïd fails to point out that the CPE movement led to a partial victory not a defeat as in 2003. That it was only partial, i.e. limited to sections of the youth and the working class, as well as the movement’s failure to leave any permanent fighting structures behind it, (a feature of all the social movements of recent years) is not some act of God or “the historical process” but the fault of the leadership of the movement including its left wing – the LCR.
What Bensaïd’s passive theorising is designed to cover up is that every single time there is a mass social movement in France (and that has been every two or three years this century) the French far left in general and the LCR in particular fail to challenge the control of the union leadership, even within the rank and file coordinations, which they themselves play a significant role initiating. They totally fail to give a concrete perspective for transforming the mass action which is sparked by a burning but limited issue or series of issues into a serious class wide confrontation with the right wing government.
This would require a serious campaign for an all out general strike, workplace occupations, the building of a trained service d’ordre and mass pickets. This would meet the opposition and sabotage of the CGT, CFDT and FO bureaucracies. Of course, you might well succeed in overcoming the bureaucratic resistance. But something would be left behind, a strengthened revolutionary organization, strengthened rank and file organisation, alerted to the treachery of the bureaucrats. And more widely there would remain a mass of youth and rank and file workers looking to revolutionaries for a lead in the next struggle. This would ensure that it starts on a much higher level with a more credible alternative leadership to the bureaucrats already in place. This is what a revolutionary policy means.
Rather than such a policy the LCR leadership see the “politicization” of the struggle exclusively as an electoral struggle, rather than its transformation from a trade union or protest movement into a struggle between classes – a struggle for power. Of course, it hopes that the social struggle on the streets will somehow get reflected at the ballot box but it does so in an utterly passive, i.e. a left reformist, manner.
This is not to say that the LCR is a reformist organisation. Subjectively its militants identify themselves as revolutionaries and its leaders as sophisticated Marxists. But the moment the time comes to address themselves to a massive social movement on the streets or a mass working class electorate, the LCR leaders turn, chameleon-like, into left reformists. Their excuse is that the situation is not ripe for revolutionary tactics or a revolutionary programme. This combination of Marxism in theory with reformism in practice has a name – centrism. No party worth anything has been or will be built on this basis.
LCR centrism and the elections
Whenever it comes to elections held after great social movements the LCR works with a two-stage approach – related to the two rounds of many elections in France. In the first round the idea is to make the biggest gains for the left by advocating unity with the PCF, the Greens and other reformist small fry, on any basis they will accept: i.e. the lowest common denominator. Only if all else fails should you stand your own candidate and even then not on a revolutionary programme but on a “realistic” reformist one. This necessarily means excluding all strategic answers to the really burning social problems, mass unemployment, précarité, the racist police force, and so on, those which pose the property question and the question of state power.
This was clear in the same interview by Bensaïd. When asked what was the meaning of Olivier Besancenot’s candidacy he replied:
“First of all to defend a programme, an alternative project on the left of the PS – and independent of the PS – which will not compromise on principles at the first elections. This is a long-term project.”
Here, the ‘long-term project’ is a permanent electoral alliance with the CP or even fusion, so long as it agrees not to govern with the Socialist Party. While, the LCR are naturally correct to reject a ‘partnership’ with the SP they would be all to happy to enter a government at the head of the state – as their section in Brazil did and as Bensaid has recently ‘theorized’ for them.
He adds:
“We also want to put the social questions at the centre to ensure that the election campaign is a serious argument about social rights, public services and so on, ..”
Again, there is no idea of using the electoral tribune to summon a new mass social movement, a new wave of militant class struggle to ensure that Sarkozy or Royal will suffer the fate of Jupé or De Villepin.
Such a programme limited to reforms also means silence on the methods to achieve them – mass direct action up to and including the all out political general strike. Instead, unity at all costs is the message the LCR takes to the vanguard working class fighters. But even this scenario is not ultimately serious; because when the second round comes the question is “anyone to stop the right.” In 2002 this approach led to the grossest opportunism- calling for a vote for Chirac to stop the fascists when the “catastrophe” occurred of Jospin and the PS being beaten in the first round – in part because over 10% voted for the far left candidates.
Once again the LCR had a principled alternative; rally the 10% vote for the left and the mass demonstrations against Le Pen to declare ‘Le Pen will not pass!’ however many votes he gets. To the Gaullists, the FN, the other bourgeois riff-raff and their mass electorate the message should have been “if you vote to install Le Pen in the Elysée Palace we will put him and you out of it for good. You will never succeed in using the scarecrow of fascism terrify us into supporting a bourgeois president or government.’
Invoking the catastrophe of 2002 Bensaïd clearly regards it as vital that Royal gets through the first round and thus is sanguine at the prospect of there being not too high a score for the “far left.” Of course he wants enough votes to save the honour of the LCR (and the PCF, LO etc.) but then to quietly recommend a vote for Royal in the second as the “lesser evil”. But as 2002 precisely shows it is not so easy to calibrate votes to achieve such contradictory ends – in effect admitting to the voters that you are not really serious about winning. If it is so dangerous if Royal does not get through to the second round why risk it by voting Besancenot?
This frivolous “electoral cretinism” also mistakes the size of votes for the magnitude of social, i.e. class, forces. Instead of focusing on how to turn the huge and militant social forces, such as those displayed in 2003 and 2005-6 into a political class struggle, Bensaïd is obviously warning LCR members to hunker down, accept defeat and wait for better days at the polls.
We have no doubt that after the elections, the LCR will return to the streets and try to generate another social movement against either Sarkozy’s anti-union laws or Royal’s second try at the EU constitution or whatever issue erupts first. Once again the LCR will tail-end the leaders of the unions, the PCF, ATTAC or whatever, all the while spinning dreams of “left unity” or even a new party which is neither ‘reformist nor revolutionary’.
Bensaid and his party are trying to breed a unicorn.
What is the way out of the fragments of the “unitary left”?
Lutte Ouvrière, the other sizeable far left “Trotskyist” organisation has always said that it would stand Arlette Laguiller its candidate in every presidential election since 1973. Her main slogan “always on the side of workers “ correctly expresses the passive tailist position of LO. While they denounce capitalism and the dictatorship of the big bosses, they are satisfied to simply stand with the workers, unable to propose any concrete plan about how to move forward – let alone struggle for power. While they denounce the LCR errors, their sectarianism in this campaign, and most important in the recent wave of class struggle (they effectively denounced the “rioting” of November 2005 as lumpen rage), has sealed them off from the most dynamic and advanced workers, immigrants and youth. Laguiller’s campaign is therefore no real expression of the struggles or mass movements of recent years.
The radical left in France will therefore go divided to the first round election- with up to five different candidates. Far more unfortunate than this is that not one of the candidates advances a revolutionary socialist program nor even suggests an action program to repel the neo-liberal attacks from Sarkozy or Royal after the elections. The most important task of revolutionaries in France is to organize resistance against these attacks and at the same agitate for workers in the militant unions, in the far left groups, to lay the foundations of a new revolutionary party through these struggles.
The question is how to address these tasks and who to address them to in the first place. We believe that for all the LCR’s left reformist platform and centrist tactics Olivier Besancenot is the candidate who can justly claim to have been in the forefront of all the struggles over the last years- not simply being in active solidarity with strikes (like Arlette) but with the anticapitalist and antiwar mobilizations, with the uprising of the banlieues youth and the struggles of the sans papiers, the unemployed and the homeless. Lutte Ouviere kept a shameful near silence on these – implying that they were outbursts of lumpen desperation. Therefore the most class conscious and militant forces from these struggles are likely to rally to Olivier’s campaign.
In this sense he has the best claim to represent the movements of resistance, even though his programme does not at all adequately address the needs each one of them has posed. For this reason the League for the Fifth International’s supporters in France are giving him support and will participate in his campaign. However, in doing so we will also make a critique of the centrist practice of the LCR, which has led to the crisis on the left. At several key moments in the class struggle over the last five years the LCR has tailed the reformist and bureaucratic leaderships of the working class, particularly the PCF, rather than give the movement the revolutionary leadership that can challenge this strangle hold.
We can be sure that the presidency of either Royal or Sarkosy will lead to new attacks on the class. Revolutionaries must argue that the election campaign of Besancenot must prepare the ground for these attacks, rather than just make propaganda for the left reformist programme of Besancenot. We must argue with the militants attracted to the campaign for an action programme for resistance to Sarkozy and Royal and for a new workers party, founded by mass forces in the unions and the whole range of anticapitalist, anti-racist, anti- war movements. We say from the outset that any new party must have a revolutionary programme and a democratic centralist type of party organization, if it is to successfully lead the working class to its emancipation.