france the collapse of gaullism The article below was written before the voting in the first round of the French presidential elections took place. A full analysis of the first-round returns cannot yet be made. But some general features are clear: * The first characteristic of the May 5 voting is that it confirmed that a broad political realignment of the right wing is going on. This shake up is directly linked to the culmination of the crisis of the state apparatus set up by Gaullism in 1958. Chaban-Delmas, the candidate of the "state party," suffered a real rout, obtaining only 15.10 percent of the vote, despite the fact that he represented a party that has been in power for sixteen years as the majority of the governing coalition. The bourgeoisie lined up behind Minister of Finance Giscard d'Estaing, who got 32.60 percent of the * Mitterrand, the Socialist party leader and candidate of the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) got 1 million more votes than the parties of the Union de la Gauche received in the March 1973 legislative elections. He took 43.24 percent of the vote, a much higher percentage than he got in the 1965 presidential elections and more than the left parties got in the 1973 legislative elections, thus registering the rodicalization and general turn to the left of the French electorate. The rate of abstention was quite low (15.77 percent), a fact that generally benefited the right. But Mitterrand fell short of the 45-46 percent that would have virtually assured him an easy victory on the second round. * Part of the left electorate did not vote for Mitterrand on the first round. The total vote for the for left (between 3 and 4 percent) wos large, probably reflecting the opposition of a section of the workers vanguard and of Communist milifants to Mitterrand as a politician and to the right-wing campaign that was run by the Union de la Gauche. But analyzing the far-left vote is more complex. Arlette Laguiller, the candidate of Lutte Ouvriêre (Worker Struggle), received 595, 247 votes (2.33 percent). Alain Krivine, the candidate of the Front Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionory Communist Front), got 93,990 votes (0.36 porcent). Kand Dumant, who ran with the support of the ecology movement, got 337,800 votes (1.32 percent). It is difficult to break down the political composition of Dumont's vote. But it is important to consider the scores of Laguiller and Krivine, the two candidates claiming allegiance to Trotskyism. In addition, many people of the far left voted for Mitterrand on the first round, since they wanted to "make their vote count" and hoped that Mitterrand would make it on the first round. The very large difference in the two scores cannot be exFrench presidential elections were not supposed to take place until 1976. The May 5 and 19 elections were brought on by a chance occurrence: the death of Georges Pompidou. But that does not make them any less important. Pompidou's sudden disappearance from the scene opened a new stage in the crisis of the system of bourgeois rule established in 1958: the Gaullist regime, the Fifth Republic. A new stage because the crisis did not break out only recently. Actually, it goes back to the general strike of May-June 1968. Since then, plained by the degree of implantation of each group. The analysis of the vote on a city by city basis shows that it is scarcely related to the number of members or influence of the groups. Nor can it be explained by the two groups' abilities to mobilize people. The FCR consistently turns out more people for polifical meetings, demonstrations, etc. than LO. The difference results above all from the different political style and content of the two compaigns. After the possibility of a Plaget candidacy fell through (see the article below), the FCK opted for an electoral campaign of political education, pointing to the problems of the struggle in the coming months, especially in the event of a Mitterrand vicfory. This campaign was much more successful than previous campaigns run by the revolutionary Marxists. It was far more concrete. A big effort was made to "depersonalize" the campaign by giving the floor to many militants during campaign meetings and radio and television broadcasts. Utilizing examples like the French popular front of 1936, the Chilean coup, and the recent workers struggles in France, the campaign was able to deal on radio and television with important problems such as the exploitation of women, the role of the army and il - struggle against militarism (on this point, Galley, the miraster of the army, was forced into a public polemic with Krivine), the formation of strike committees during workers struggles, the meaning of workers self-defense, and so on. The political response to this campaign was very broad, and the vate for Krivine was seen by everyone as a vote for socialist revolution. Lutte Ouvrière opted for a different sort of campaign: personal testimony about capitalist exploitation and the oppression of women, elementary distrust of Mitterrand as a bourgeois politician. In order to run such a campaign, LO decided to avoid bringing up the essential problems of the coming struggles. LO thus succeeded in crystallizing around Arlette Laguiller (a woman worker active in the trode unions) a composite ensemble of minority electoral currents that saw their own images reflected in her candidacy: militant Pers who found Mitterrand hard to take; feminist voters voting for a woman candidate: populists voting for a worker. A reent poll commissioned by the Paris daily Le Figoro (which may not be quite accurate), indicated that as of the opening of the second-round campaign 42 percent of those who voted for Laguiller on the ract round intended to vote for Giscard d'Estaing on the second round; only 46 percent intended to vate for Mitterrand! If this figure were confirmed, it would indicate o much greater heterogeneity of the Laguiller vote than could have been expected. Despite the important political differences between the FCR and LO, both groups have entered the battle of the second round by calling for the defeat of Giscard and a vote to Mitterrand. The revolutionary militants must make the secondround campaign a real class campaign. We will return to the problems raised by the French presidential election in the next issue of INPRECOR
PIERRE ROUSSET - May 9the fruits of May '68 have been ripening with the year, leaving their mark on both political life and social struggles. Fundamentally, the current presidential elections are the result of that process. THE BACKGROUND OF CLASS STRUGGLE People began talking about possible elections as long ago as
3
france last autumn, for the government had proven incapable of blocking the development of struggles among the workers and the student youth. A lot of ground had already been covered in the six years since May '68. Some of the sectors thatentered the struggle in a massive way (civil service employees, gas and electric workers, metalworkers) had not demonstrated
Demands were raised indicating that the level of consciousness and the possibility of unifying the various struggles had increased: equal and across the board wage increases for all, minimum monthly wage of 1,500 francs (about US$300), sliding scale of wages, etc. Qualitative steps forward had also been taken in regard to the forms of struggle and the organization of the workers during the struggles: There were many more factory occupations, militant picket lines, even flying squads (as at Olivetti), establishment of strike funds, continuation of production for the benefit of the workers (as in the Lip watch factory), centralization of strike commitfees (as in the banking sector), etc. On two accasions since the legislative elections of March 1973, student youth had taken to the streets on a national scale in massive numbers.
The fact that some strikes were continued after Pompidou's death -- even if partially -- (in the banks, in the Atlantic shipyards, among the metalworkers) was a clear sympton of the new social climate. In France it is quite exceptional for such struggles to continue during an electoral period. The Communist party and the CGT (Confedération Générale du Travail -- General Confederation of Labor, the CP-dominated trode-union federation), while they tried to organize a "return to order" and block any generalization of the struggles, were forced to refrain from openly calling for a "social In spite of the relative defeat of the May 1968 general strike, the class struggle since then has maintained a level incompatible with the "normal" bourgeois direction of society. Or better still, the continual deepening of the class struggle has dominated political considerations and accounts for the attitudes of the various parties. The "Common Program" and the governmental agreement between the CP and the Socialist party were born of the absolute need of the reformist workers parties to present a credible political perspective able to canalize the social pressure building up and contain it within the framework of the system -- a necessity that became clear to the leaders of these parties after their miserable defeat in the June 1968 elections as a result of their betrayal of the general strike. This same necessity is equally operative today. One of the most important characteristics of the struggles of these past years hos been the emergence of a workers vanguard little by little assuming a mass character and achieving through struggle significant breaks with the framework worked out in advance by the reformist leaders of the trade unions and the workers parties. In this present context -- and especially with the addition of a new layer of young workers - the apparatus that had allowed the CP to choke off struggles of which it did not approve has lost a good deal of its effectiveso in that the revolutionary organizations are little by little getting into the factories to the point that their influence there is immeasurably greater than it was six years ago.
The bourgeoisie has found it difficult to get out of its present
Impasse. The exacerbation of international competition, inevitable inflation, and the likely prospect of a recession deprive it of the means to resort to a "social" policy capable of forestalling workers struggles. On the other hand, it has to make the workers foot the bill for the maintenance and strengthening of the position of French capitalism before the crisis gets worse. But the current relationship of forces prevents the bourgeoisie from moving to a direct, frontal assault in order to break the workers combativity except at grave risk. How best to prepare for a seemingly inevitable general class confrontation? That is the question dividing the bourgeois parties today.
Finding an answer is not so easy. The "moral decay" of the
French right-wing and center is considerable. And bourgeois institutions have been plunged into a deep crisis.
THE END OF GAULLISM
Pompidou's death signalled the final demise of the regime created in 1958. Prime Minister Pierre Auguste Messmer,
President of the National Assembly Edgar Faure, and Christian
Fouchet, a former minister and Goullist luminary all declared themselves candidates -- and then withdrew. Among the former majority, the field was left to Jacques Chaban-Delmas,
Pompidou's former prime minister who had been fired in 1972, as the candidate of the UDR (Union des Démocrates pour la
République -- Union of Democrats for the Republic, the main Goullist political formation); Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the minister of finances and head of the "Independent Republicans"; and Jean Royer, Former minister of commerce and trode, later minister of posts and telegraphs, a politician a la Poujade (a demagog appealing to the traditional pettybourgeoisie). These candidates have differing political platforms. But they illustrate above all the demise of the Gaullist monolith. Since 1958 French political life has been marked by the existence of a "strong state" erected on the ruins of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This strong state was born of the desire of monopoly capital to free itself from the constant pressure of interest groups based among the petty and middle bourgeoisie and to deal both with the competition created by the Common Market and with the workers movement in order to create conditions favorable to making the French economy more profitable. But the strong state had to be imposed through a show of force by the army, which seized the opportunity created by the Algerian crisis. The strong state took on the forms of a Bonapartist regime. In order fo put an end to the attempt to maintain a colonial empire and to smash the parliamentary regime, the traditional bourgeois parties had to be pushed aside and the workers movement had to be isolated and weakened. For that the bourgeoisie needed a "Bonaparte," a man who could appear as the savior of a France threatened with chaos. That man was Charles de Gaulle. May 1968 opened a general crisis of the Gaullist regime, which rested on a twofold balance of forces: within the bourgeoisie on the one hand (in order to assure the most advanced sectors of capital the greatest freedom of action) and between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat on the other hand (in order to maintain relative "social peace"). This balance of forces was overturned by the new rise of workers struggles. The Bonaparte, who had lost his charismatic power
and whose regime had worn down, became a liability instead of an asset. In fact, the weakening of parliament and the bourgeois parties, the lack of a real presidential regime, and the end of the parliamentary shell-game played by the reformist workers parties all combined to tend to transform every significant struggle for social demands into a direct conflict with the state. Thanks to the "great fear" and the demoralization born of the betrayal of the May general strike by the workers leoderships, the elections of June 1968 resulted in a reactionary majority numerically stronger than ever. But that concealed the erosion of the governmental edifice only in a very temporary and provisional way. From that time on, the bourgeoisie was looking for some alternative solution. It seized the opportunity offered by the 1969 referendum on decentralization to thank de Gaulle for his services and send him on his way by making a big enough push to defeat the referendum. Then it moved to elect Pompidou. But Pompidou locked the prestige that de Gaulle commanded in 1958. The Bonapartist regime couldn't make it without a Bonaparte. Successive goverments proved unable to correct the situation. The March 1973 legislative elections dealt the regime yet another blow. The UDR, de Gaulle's party, lost is absolute majority in parliament. And no matter which candidate is elected president in 1974, these elections will mark the and of the uncontested political hegemony of the party created by the 1958 coup d'etat. The competition between Chaban-Delmas and Giscard d'Estaing (the two main candidates of the old majority) illustrated the bourgeoisie's difficulty in working out the conditions for a new political equilibrium. THE STANDARD-BEARERS OF THE OLD MAJORITY GISCARD D'ESTAING believes it is time to leap into postGaullism: to reconstitute real bourgeois parties around axes outside the UDR (which he considers incapable of transformation because of its origins as a hodgepodge of state careerists and parasites grouped around de Gaulle); to broaden the majority toward the center; to create a real presidential regime; to institute a more "reasonable" foreign policy. Unfortunately for Giscard, all this is easier said than done. The UDR cannot be tossed out of the government without being thrown into a great crisis. This is a party unable to exist without being integrated into the state apparatus. And the minister of finance is regarded as "the monopolies' man" by the traditional petty-bourgeoisie. But his "new majority" can be forged only through an electoral alliance with the petty bourgeoisie. A known right-winger, he has to promise an anti-Marcellin policy of "liberalization" in order to win over a section of the reform bloc; but he knows that he will have to push for an antiworker policy. CHABAN-DELMAS wanted to try to avoid this crisis by assuring the continuity of Gaullism. To be sure, since 1969 the majority had already moved far away from the original Gaullist themes. "Pompidouism" rook o quiet tum toward Washington in foreign policy, and the program of "participation" during 1971-72 granted a big role to the trode unions instead of working around them. But Chaban again took up the themes of "contracts for progress" (proposing a "contract for each French citizen"), of "national independence, " and of the "new society" (during his campaign, he denounced "anarchic capitalism" along with "totalitarian socialism"). In short, he tried to present himself almost as a leffist. But Chaban's program just wasn't credible. He promised a "social"
policy while everyone knew that the bourgeoisie was preparing "austerity" for the workers. He claimed he was a "progressive" while coming forward as the man of the UDR, the most reactionary political formation around, the party of the "godillots." (A term of derision used to refer to the mindless robots elected to parliament in the June 1968 election -- INPRECOR.) What Chaban and Giscard were octually fighting about was what would be the least undesirable form of political rule for the bourgeoisie. But each of them was soddled with crying contradictions on one point or another. At bottom, neither seamed able to clamp a lid on the new rise of workers strugFROM THE COMMON PROGRAM TO THE PRESIDENTIAL CHARTER The traditional left thinks it has a chance to win these elecfions. And, in its own way, it has drown the lessons of Chile. It is looking for an "opening" to the right! The Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) today is essentially a coalition between the two major reformist workers parties, the Communist party and the Socialist party. The left radicals -- a few individual bourgeois politicians who survived the collapse of the old Radical party -- have little weight in the coalition. But their presence is symbolic of a potential broadening. And today we can see a double evolution: * On the one hand, Mitterrand (the general secretary of the Socialist party and the candidate supported by the Union de la Gauche parties) has been seeking to present himself as the "president of all the French people" and to gain maximum independence from the Union de la Gauche. The most "radical" themes in the Common Program (like nationalizations) and the program of trade-union demands (minimum monthly wage of 1,500 francs, later reduced to 1,200 francs) have had a tendency to disappear from the presidential campaign. The Common Program has been supplanted by a minimalist "Presidential Charter" that is now the only thing Mitterrund is answerable to. The CP and SP are making all kinds of odvances toward managers, owners of "small and middle-sized
"and small merchants. The tone gets more "responsible" every day. The CP and SP are presenting themselves as the ones best able to manage the French economy and are promising not to break with the Atlantic Alliance. + Concurrently, and in spite of the above development, a real cless polarization is taking place. Mitterrand is supported by the Union de la Gauche, that is, essentially by the CP and SP. The CGT, the CFDT (Confédération Frangaise Démocratique du Travail -- French Democratic Confederation of Labor, the country's seconde largest trade-union federation), and the PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié -- United Socialist party, a centrist formation) are supporting him. He thus has the support of all the significant reformist and centrist, political and trade-union forces of the working class. This is true to such an extent that in spite of the right-wing campaign Mitterrand ran on the first round, even among the for left many people voted for him. In order to pick up votes from forces to the left of the CP os well as those to its right, Mitterrand went so far as to define himself (verbally) as the candidate of the current that is formed around the Common Program and of the "self-management" current (that is, the SP left wing, the PSU, and the CFDT). On the other hand, no significant bourgeois formation called for the candidate of the left. Only Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was stricken with on attack of conscience and hesitated between Mitterrand and Giscard d'Estaing.
france On a deeper level, the plan of Mitferrand, the CP, and the SP to extend a hand to the right is running up against two major obstacles: the danger of the rank and file overtaking the leadership and the fact that the bourgeoisie itself has also drown the lessons of Chile. It knows that if Mitterrand were elecled it could wring much more out of the left by opposing it than by offering it negotiations aimed at setting up a "great coalition." At least if Mitterrand and the SP do not break with the CP. But that would create the conditions for the ranks outflanking the leadership; the SP would probably be wrecked and Mitterrand as an individual would lose a good deal of his potential usefulness for the bourgeoisie: his ability to act as a last resort against the rise of social struggles. THE CAMPAIGN OF THE REVOLUTIONARIES In such a context it is important for the voices of revolutionaries to be heard: To popularize the goals of struggle that the working class can and must take up; to show how to use the struggles of today to prepare for the socialism of tomorrow; to counterpose a revolutionary strategy to the reformist road of the Union de la Gauche; to begin right now preparing for the struggles that will break out after the elections; to organize the challenge to the Union de la Gauche. are themes that have already been developed in the Action Program published by the Trotskyist newspaper Rouge. During the two weeks that followed the death of Pompidou, Trotskyist militants fought for a unitary candidate of the for left. They proposed to run Charles Piaget, the best known of the organizers of the Lip strike. His condidacy could have grouped together the broad workers vanguard, promoted the creation of unitary rank-and-file committees going way beyond the close sympathizers of the revolutionary groups, and prepared in the best possible way to go beyond the outlook of the Union de la Gauche in the event of Mitterrand's elecA large number of organizations and currents within the for left got behind this proposal -- Rouge, Révolution (a group that split from the Ligue Communiste in 1971), the Alliance Marxiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Marxist Alliance, the group headed by Michel Pablo), the left wing of the PSU, Libération (the daily newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre), Politique Hebdo (an independent far-left newspaper). The OCI (Organisation Communiste Internationaliste -- Infernationalist Communist Organization, a sect claiming odherence to Trotskyism, led by Pierre Lambert) called for a first-round vote for Mitterrand. Lutte Ouvrière (an organization of Trotskyist origin now strongly "workerist") adopted an ultrasectarian attitude, rejecting any possibility of a common candidacy and presenting its own candidate immediately upon the death of Pompidou. She was Arlette Loguiller, a militant in the bank workers union who played a major role in the strike of the Banque National de Paris, which went on before and during the elections. Above all, the PSU, of which Piaget is a member, manifested the ambiguity that so marks it by opting for the position worked out by one of its leaders, Michel Rocard, who called for people to "rally critically" to Mitterrand's candidacy. That represented a real capitulation to the reformist organizations on the part of the PSU. It will weigh heavily in the PU's future. Some 35 percent of the votes in the PSU National Council were cast in favor of running Piaget. The "Gauche Ouvrière et Paysanne" (Worker and Peasant Left), a populist current that was already on its way out of the PSU, split after this vote. The representatives of the Paris Federation resigned from the National Council. The embryonic crisis
6 that this group experienced in May '68 suddenly broke te the surface. Because of the PSU decision, Piaget's candidacy could not materialize, despite the response it would have received in the factories. Under these conditions, the revolutionary Marxists made two decisions: to form a new organization, the Front Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist Front) and to run Alain Krivine as a candidate. The banning of the Ligue Communiste, former French section of the Fourth International, in June 1973 following an antiFascist demonstration, had left a vacuum. It was important to fill this vacuum of a time when everything possible had to be done in order to prepare for the postelection period, no matter which candidate is elected. The formation of the FCR at the call of thirty-one militants does not mean giving up the struggle to overturn the decree dissolving the Ligue Communiste. (The text of the thirty-one militants" appeal is published elsewhere in this issue -- INPRECOR.) But it was necessary for the revolutionary Marxists to be able to regroup their forces in order to better take up the hasks they will be confronted with in the near future. And in order to corry out the work of preparing the vanguard of workers and youth for the battles that are on the agenda, the revolutionary Marxists also decided to launch a daily newspaper for the period of the election campaign. PREPARE FOR TOMORROW'S STRUGGLES These tasks will in fact be large ones. In any cose the bourgeoisie will not resolve its crisis of political leadenhip through the presidential elections. The rise of the clams atrug gle will continue. Because a class confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariot lurks behind the "left-right" electoral confrontation; because the election of Mitterrand would consequently be seen by the French working clam as a victory and an encouragement to struggle; because the experience of a reformist government today would be favorable to a political clarification within the working class and because the elements that could lead to the Union de la Gauche being outflanked have built up constantly since May 68, the Trotskyist militants will probably decide to call for a vote for Mitterrand on the second round of the elections. Of course, after leading and while continuing to lead a campaign fo counterpose revolutionary perspectives to those of the reformist workers parties. And by linking this vote to the popularization and development of transitional demands and the denunciation of any prospect of coalition with parties that represent the bourgeoisie. And on condition that such agreements on coalitions are not mode betwoen the first and second rounds, which would water down the meaning of a The revolutionary campaign will not have the impact it would have hod if Plaget had run, In this the PSU and the sectarian elements among the far left bear a heavy responsibility. Nevertheless, the campaign can be quite important. It can accelerate the polarization of the workers vanguard, It can facilitate national centralization of a current able to prepare for going beyond the narrow outlook of the Union de la Gauche if Mitterrand is elected and can assure the relaunching of struggle to avoid any deep demoralization among the workers if a bourgeois candidate is elected. And, it can strengthen the base of the revolutionary Marxists in all areas.
- PIERRE ROUSSET -O