long live the FRONT
REVOLUTIONNAIRE
COMMUNISTE call Deep upheavals are on the way in France. The growing rise of workers struggles, the challenging of the employers' rights in the factories, and the mobilizations of students and worker youth against military control, unemployment, and superexploitation represent a widening of the breach opened in May 1968. These struggles of the working class and the youth demonstrate a combativity that neither repression nor cooptation has managed to break. They are developing in the framework of a deepening crisis of the strong state born of the 1958 coup d'etat, a crisis of institutions and a crisis of the instruments of bourgeois domination reflected in the courts, the amy, and the police. In this context the presidential elections take on a special significance. For millions of workers and youth, they can appear as a political result of the daily battles they are waging. This is all the more true in that the bourgeois political formations are racked by a crisis and division unprecedented since 1958. But the responses to this crisis offered by the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left, the coalition of the Communist party, the Socialist party, and the small Left Radical grouping -- INPRECOR) are ridiculous. The same parties that failed to meet the tasks posed by May '68, instead denouncing that revolutionary crisis as a plot hatched by the bourgeoisie, are today proposing no alternative other than patching up the system, leaving the bourgeoisie a free hand to set its economic and military schemes into motion whenever it deems if useful to do so. Not only are they not calling on the workers to organize themselves immediately -- the only step that can confront bourgeois repression and assure the winning of the workers demands. They are also advocating social truce and national unity in order to demobilize the workers. The tasks of the revolutionaries are therefore immense. It is not only a matter of being present in all the struggles that challenge capitalist society, but also of projecting political answers to an ever more numerous workers vanguard that is breaking in practice with reformist politics. And, if the Union de la Gauche is victorious, it is also a matter of immediately preparing the preconditions for selforganization and self-defense of the workers againsf the trenchant resistance that the bourgeoisie will mount. Finally, it is a matter of lending anticapitalist struggles their internationalist dimension both by drawing the lessons of the Chilean experience and by counterposing the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe to the maintenance of the Europe of the trusts and monopolies, which is in no way challenged by the Common Program of the Union de la Gauche. It is because they defend such ideas and try to integrate them into their octivity that revolutionary Marxists have constantly faced repression, repression that has included imprisonment and the dissolution of organizations. Such was the case with the Ligue Communiste (former French section of the Fourth International, ordered dissolved by Pompidou on June 28, 1973 -- INPREC OR). We assure the former members of the Ligue of our support in the struggle to overturn the rotten decree of June 28, which was used against them because of their opposition to the racist intrigues of fascist organizations tolerated by the regime. Further, in the workers movement itself, revolutionary Marxists run up against a bureaucratic repression that tries constantly -- although with greater and greater difficulties - to expel them. To take up these tosks, to take up the fight launched by the Bolshevik party in Russia and continued by Trotsky and the Fourth International, and to take an active part in the struggles of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants in Europe and throughout the world today, the undersigned have decided to set up on organization. In the tradition of proletarian internationalism, this organization will try to link the struggles of the French workers to the worldwide fight against capitalism. By recognizing the right of members to form tendencies while still maintaining the centralization needed to prepare for the destruction of the bourgeois state by the workers themselves, this organization will break the Stalinist caricature of democratic centralism. Finally, it will try everywhere to foster the development of self-organization of the working class in order to propare within the struggles of today the socialist self-management of tomorrow, democratically centralized by the state of workers councils. That is why the undersigned revolutionary militants, having participated in the main battles of the working class since 1968, call for the formation of a new organization, for the building everywhere of th federations and sections with a view toward holding a first congress soon. Toward this end they designate a provisional leodership and call upon the workers and youth to join the now organization in massive numbers. LONG LIVE THE FRONT COMMUNISTE REVOLUTIONNAIRE! LONG LIVE THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION! Signatures: Elsa PETIT (teacher), Michel ROUSSEAU (post, telophone, and telegraph employee), J.P. RATAJ (hospital worker), Andre FICHAUT (electrical worker), Michel RECANATI (student), Pierre FRANK, Michel LEQUENNE (editor), Michel FIELD (high-schooler), Marcel Francis KAHN (physician), Jean-Marc POIRON (teacher), R. ADRASTE (bookkeeper), Alain KRIVINE (jouralist), Jean Marie VINCENT (economist), S. ROUX (hospital worker), Jules FOURRIER (construction worker, former Communist deputy in the Popular Fronf), Pierre ROUSSET (journalist), Emilia SCIALOM (teacher), Wilfred PASQUET (docker), G. TOMASSIN (civil servanf), Jacques HOUDET (insurance worker), J.L. DION (chemical worker), G. REY (metalworker), J.P. BILLARD (bank employee), Marcel DELTELL (special educator), Gérard PESSY (post, telephone, and telegraph employee), Suzette ROBICHON (white-collar worker), Claude BOVANA (railroad worker), Colette BLIESNIK (teacher), Gilles LEMET (watchman), JeanPierre PUJKIS (worker), Andre HOUDAYER (hospital worker), D. VAILLANT (chemical technician), Sophie PETERSON (white-collar worker), Paul ADAM (student).