Over the past three years France has been in the forefront of the European class struggle. The mass strikes and street demonstrations of November and December 1995 and the lorry drivers’ strikes and blockades in succeeding years crippled and discredited the right wing government of Alain Juppé. This led to victory for the Socialist Party (PS) and Communist Party (PCF) in last June’s elections.
Headed by Lionel Jospin, the new government promised to tackle the question of unemployment. France has a jobless rate of 12.2%. But by the turn of the year a militant movement of the unemployed was occupying job centres and demanding that Jospin introduce substantial improvements in unemployment pay and job creation schemes.
These developments have led to a major shake-up on the far-left, in Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR). The events of recent years have only confirmed the LCR leadership in its strategy of “mutation” into reformism and left the LO leaders unmoved in their passive propagandism. But critics have emerged in both organisations, dissatisfied with their leaders’ policies.
Disciplined
LO, with its hundreds of fortnightly factory bulletins, its highly disciplined members, and its popular perennial Presidential candidate, Arlette Laguiller, can seem an orthodox alternative to the LCR’s revisionism. In reality, LO’s politics are sterile and abstract. This is true even of their factory bulletins which offer no operative tactics or overall strategy to workers in struggle.
Behind the façade of “discipline” lurks an internal regime centred around a cult leader which would not be out of place in a Stalinist party. This regime has proved incapable of standing up to the stresses and strains of the present class struggle period, leading to growing tensions in the group.
Since the late 1980s, a small group of LO members have opposed the leadership’s line on the USSR, in particular the majority’s idea that the planned property relations were under no threat from economic and political developments. The minority’s current analysis is that capitalism has been restored in the shape of a pro-bourgeois government and state machine, but this is not yet expressed at the economic level.
Criticism
This tendency – which has never got the support of more than 3% of LO members – subsequently became a faction and broadened its criticism to other questions, such as the nature of the period, the pessimism of the majority’s positions and the need to orient to workers under the influence of the PCF with a clear set of united front proposals.
This is an unprecedented development in an organisation in which the leadership’s congress documents are regularly adopted without the slightest opposition and in which political discussion rarely takes place.
Whereas the Faction maintained an armed truce with the leadership – they have a weekly column in the paper, they have their own factory bulletins and branch meetings – the LO leadership indicated that it will not tolerate any new dissent.
Just under a year ago, LO expelled two of its main branches – Bordeaux and Rouen – which have since formed the Voix des Travailleurs (VDT – Workers Voice).
The VDT were expelled because they opposed the LO leadership’s refusal to carry out its promise to build a new workers’ party following the 1.5 million votes gained by Arlette in the 1995 Presidential elections.
While inside LO, the leaders of what became the VDT had initially argued the LO leadership was being too soft on the Faction and should have expelled them! This meant that when the LO cult leader, “Hardy”, decided to turn against the Rouen and Bordeaux branches, they were in a weak position to rally support in the organisation. Nor had they developed a critique of the political degeneration of LO or fought for a rounded political alternative to it.
Hardy’s pretext for attacking the leaders of what became the VDT was that they had accepted that two members who were partners should participate in the same activities (LO has strict – and strange – rules about partners not working alongside each other). The real issue was that they had privately expressed their lack of confidence in Hardy. That is a cardinal sin in LO. The inevitable result was the expulsion of the two branches, with only the Faction voting against.
Since being expelled, the VDT have taken a number of steps away from the passive propagandism and sectarianism that has characterised LO over the last 10-15 years. They are breaking from LO’s negative approach to programme. During the 1995 presidential elections, LO issued a short, abstract “emergency programme” of reforms and speculated on the possibility of founding a new “workers’ party” only to drop it shortly after.
The VDT have taken a step forward from all of this. They have published a draft programme which raises transitional – not merely reformist – demands and lays particular emphasis on the question of workers’ control. Nevertheless it has serious weaknesses: economic catastrophism, a lack of any serious treatment of racism or the Front National, a lack of tactics to defeat the trade union bureaucracy and the reformist parties and a tendency to reduce differences with rival tendencies to their supposed petit bourgeois class composition.
To really help build a revolutionary party, they will have to take their draft programme to its logical conclusion and fight for a re-elaborated action programme for France firmly based on the transitional method. But this evolution is far from certain.
The VDT place great emphasis on the need for revolutionary regroupment – hence their draft programme which they want the whole of the left to discuss.
This regroupment offensive has already scored some successes – the VDT have recently fused with the Ligue Sociale des Travailleurs, the small French section of the Morenoite International Workers League, are in serious discussion with the Gauche Révolutionnaire (Militant) and have a joint electoral list with the dissident Rouen branch of the LCR.
However, the political differences between these tendencies are far from being fully resolved. For example, the fusion between the VDT and the LST leaves open a number of important questions – the “new” trade unions in France such as the Syndicats Unitaires Democratiques (SUD), the Yugoslav civil wars, and the collapse of Stalinism. This method of leaving aside major questions of method, programme or tactics in favour of joint work or semi-fusion inevitably means that political divisions will reappear at the first major test.
Similar problems were encountered when the VDT, together with the LO Faction and the Révolution! tendency in the LCR, organised the Rencontre Militante Ouvrière – Militant Workers’ Meeting (RMO). This was a conference at which 500 workers, most of them industrial workers in and around the far-left groups, met to discuss the problems of their workplaces and how to fight back against the bosses’ and the government’s offensives.
The meeting was a great success in drawing so many workers together for the first time. The enthusiasm and fighting potential was palpable. The VDT hoped that the meeting would be a springboard for their regroupment perspective. The question of the need for a new revolutionary party was raised repeatedly by their representatives.
However, they left the programmatic content of this party undefined and the key question of organising workers to fight back against the trade union bureaucracy was consistently ignored. Why? For the simple reason that the different tendencies present had quite different answers to this vital question.
At the moment the Lutte Ouvrière Faction seem to place more emphasis on such questions. Although, like the VDT, they have yet to grapple fully with the nature of LO and its political and organisational degeneration, they have focused their recent congress documents on the key tactical question of the united front, which LO’s hardened sectarianism leads it to reject.
The most striking example of this took place a year ago when the LO majority refused to participate in the mass demonstrations that took place against the proposed new immigration laws because these were called by a group of intellectuals who were close to the Socialist Party.
The LO Faction rejected the sectarian logic of the leadership and participated in the demonstrations, calling in their factory bulletins for workers to join the protests and denouncing the LO leadership in a paper article which was (unsurprisingly) censored.
The LO Faction’s seriousness, its origins in a political debate over a key international question (the USSR) and their openness to discussion are all signs that they too could play a positive role in the months ahead.
Danger
The greatest danger facing the attempts at revolutionary regroupment is to assume that everyone agrees on what constitutes a revolutionary programme and party. They don’t, and we cannot get round this simply by posing these issues at a general or abstract level, leaving the detail until later. The programme must be worked out first – it is the basis of what the party will do, and is the test of the party’s revolutionary credentials.
Likewise the attempt to return to some supposed healthy stage in the past of today’s major organisations will lead to future splits. LO, the LCR and the PCI (Lambertists) were not “revolutionaries” but centrists, vacillating between revolutionary and reformist positions. Their heritage – even that of ten or fifteen years ago – is not one to build upon.
The heritage we have to return to is that of Lenin and Bolshevism, that of Trotsky and the Fourth International which he founded. This is far from being a dry historical legacy. It is a living method which can be applied to the problems and tasks of today. A real and lasting unity of revolutionaries must be based on fulfilling three vital tasks:
l the elaboration a revolutionary programme which shows the road to power for workers in the last years of the twentieth century;
• the construction of a centralised and disciplined combat party with real internal democracy;
• parallel to the above tasks, the struggle to build a new revolutionary International.
The LRCI’s section in France, Pouvoir Ouvrier, is addressing all the tendencies involved in the “regroupment process” on the basis of urgently recognising the importance of these tasks and proceeding to fulfil them.
LCR tries to dissolve
The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), the French section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), is desperately trying to turn itself into a left reformist organisation by adopting a programme and perspectives that would enable it to fuse with the various tendencies in and around the decaying French Communist Party.
This attempted political suicide represents the final step in a process that began in the early 1980s and which conforms to the perspectives of dissolution repeatedly adopted at the USFI’s international congresses.
At the LCR’s recent conference, the leadership just failed to get the two thirds majority needed to drop the words “Communist” and “Revolutionary” from the name of the organisation.
Nor were they able to push through a reform of the statutes that would have abolished the LCR’s (few) workplace branches. However, the leadership has already announced that there will soon be a further congress to settle matters once and for all.
The main opposition inside the LCR, the Révolution! tendency – which plays a decisive role in the Rouen branch of the LCR – appears unaware of the scale of the political changes inside the LCR. Their main opposition focused on the question of the name and the proposed abolition of “party names”, leaving aside the key questions of programme and perspective.
And on these two points, the LCR leadership scored decisive victories. Changing the name of the organisation will merely bring the form into line with the new content. It remains to be seen whether the Révolution! tendency will wish – or be able – to remain in the LCR under its new political flag.