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From Notes of the Month, International Socialism, No.73, December 1974, pp.4-5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Richard Kirkwood writes: With inflation creeping towards 15 per cent and with really significant unemployment looming for the first time for years, France’s new conservative coalition under President Giscard d’Estaing is making it quite clear that it intends to make the workers pay for economic stabilisation. The wave of industrial action with which workers are responding is marked by one feature which has been rare in recent years, official union support and in some cases encouragement. Although the Communist Party-led CGT and the other big union federation the CFDT are not averse to selling out strikes when it suits them (e.g. the CGT last month at the Creusot-Loire engineering factory) they are both taking a generally tough line with the government in the public sector. They are talking in terms of a generalised ‘offensive’ and have encouraged the strike which is paralysing French postal services as we go to press.
But the unions are not only responding to their members’ pressures and those of workers in general. It is true that they feel forced to do something for fear of being outflanked by unofficial actions but there are other motives. The first is the need to put on a show of strength after the defeats of the ‘Union of the Left’ of Communists and Socialists in the elections of 1973 and 1974. The extreme ‘respectability’ of those years has thus given way to a tougher stand.
Equally, the tough noises of the unions reflect the internal problems of the ‘left’ union federations. Both federations, but especially the CGT are acting partly from a desire to strengthen the hands of the political parties to which each is more or less linked (the Communist Party controls the CGT and the CFDT is increasingly linked to the new Socialist Party) in the internal disputes of the ‘Union of the Left’.
The Communist Party has in recent months started to criticise its ally. Its main complaint has been that the Communist Party did not do as well on the second ballot in recent by-elections as the combined vote of the left parties in the first ballot would have implied, whereas the Socialist Party actually did better. At the same time local Socialist Party councillors are still maintaining control of councils through alliances with the centre groups and keeping out the Communist Party. Thus the Communist Party feels that it is not getting its fair share out of the alliance. This was recently made even more obvious by the strengthening of the Socialist Party with all sorts of new elements.
A Socialist discussion conference brought together the Socialist Party itself and a variety of people from both right and left of it. The most significant was the presence of leading figures from the CFDT. This still leaves France’s biggest federation, the CGT, lined up with the Communist Party but the Socialist Party is now linked to the second biggest. The Socialist Party clearly hopes that this will help to give it a bigger base among working-class activists.
In addition the new Socialist regroupment is also taking in the main leadership of the PSU (Unified Socialist Party). This party was a curious amalgam of left social democrats and semi-revolutionary elements. It picked up a lot of support among young leftists during the Algerian war, and again after May 1968, but its leaders had always hankered after the creation of a party only a little to the left of the old, corrupt French Socialists (SFIO) and able to compete with them and the Communist Party in the parliamentary arena. The formation of the new Socialist Party, its left facing language and its alliance with the Communist Party meant they had no further role and were liable to be left out in the cold. The leaders of the PSU, notably former MP Michel Rocard, were all set to take the whole party with them into the Socialist regroupment. They were narrowly defeated at a National Council by an alliance of the various centrist elements in the party including Piaget, who led the LIP work-in, and Craipeau, a former leading French Trotskyist. With half the party going with Rocard into the Socialist Party, it seems unlikely the PSU will survive. Most of its left-wing has already drifted into the various revolutionary groups and now it has lost its right. Neither reformist nor revolutionary it seems to have nowhere to go.
The Socialist Party has also gained the support of various former ‘left gaullists’ and independents of the centre-left. On the parliamentary level it clearly has much better possibilities than the Communist Party. The Communist Party has been caught in its own trap. Its commitment to ‘socialism through parliament’ meant it had to have allies to its right through whom it could seek respectability. It was the Communist Party as much as anyone who created the ‘left’ image of Mitterand and enabled him to put together a new Socialist Party with a new dynamic face instead of the old and discredited SFIO. Now, like Frankenstein, it finds itself threatened by a monster of its own making. All that it can do is make protesting noises and show a little of its industrial muscle. The only other orientation would be the revolutionary one, which it abandoned decades ago. It has been making its own attempts to find allies – this time among discontented gaullists who disagree with both the new government and the Socialists because both are too pro-American but who can link up with the intense nationalist ‘patriotism’ of the Communist Party.
This situation opens possibilities for the revolutionary left. In the public discussion before the Communist Party conference a number of party members expressed their disquiet at both the ‘opening to the gaullists’ and the present state of the Union of the Left. And one of the main themes of Arlette Laguiller’s 1974 Presidential election campaign for the revolutionaries of ‘Lutte Ouvrière’ (Workers Struggle) was specifically that Communist Party worker militants were being used to do the dirty work for opportunist politicians. Now Lutte Ouvrière supporters in factories are beginning to find Communist Party sympathisers, and even members, who will tell them in private that ‘Arlette was right’. Coupled with a rise in working-class resentment over inflation and unemployment this discontent opens possibilities that it is vital for revolutionaries to seize.
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