REVOLUTIONARY
FRANCE by PIERRE ROUSSETThe results of the two rounds of the French presidential elections and the popular reactions in the factories and neighborhoods reflected a twofold phenomenon: On the one hand there was a class polarization that asserted itself as an electoral shift to the left; on the other hand, an important section of the working class manifested its distrust of Mitterrand. On May 19, the date of the second round, some 13 million votes were cast for the "single candidate of the left. " But two weeks carlier in the first round, the candidates of the for left had gamered between 700, 000 and 1 million votes (depending on whether or not the candidacy of the agronomist Rend Dumont, who was backed by the ecology movement, is considered part of the far left. The campaigns waged by the far-left candidates must be analyzed with those results in mind - especially since they are surprising at first glance. Arlette Laguiller, the candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO -- Workers Struggle) received 595, 247 votes (2.33%); Dumont got 337, 800 votes (1.32%); and Alain Krivine, the candidate of the Trotskyist Front Communiste Révolutionnaire (FCR -- Revolutionary Communist Front) got 93,990 (0.36%), that is, about one-sixth of the LO total. The vote totals were largely independent of the degree of implantation of the formations supporting the various candidacies. And, as we shall see, the real political response gotten by the various campaigns differed considerably from the electoral scores. The explanation is simple: The electorate reached by the campaigns is far broader than the usual audience of the revalutionary organizations; the electorate knows the organizations only sketchily or not at all and is only vaguely aware of the
CAMPAIGNS differences among them. It was mainly the styles of the candidates and the content of their audiovisual campaigns (and secondarily, of the posters and brochures sent to the voters) that explains the variations in the scores. On this point, the 1974 presidential elections confirmed the indications hinted ar by previous elections: Regional variofions in the number of votes gotten by the far-left candidates are not related to the local strength of the organizations (which vary considerably), but are instead related to variations in the general sociopolitical characteristics of the electorate in each region. The style and content of the Krivine and Laguiller campaigns were profoundly different, reflecting the different choices made by the FCR and LO as to the main objectives of their campaigns. The differences between these choices merit some discussion. What Kind of Campaign for Revolutionaries? The CR's basic choice was determined above all by the organization's analysis of the situation: The gravity of the crisis of Gaullism as it has developed since 1968, the deepening of the class struggle during the past six years, and the grodual emergence in the factories of a workers vanguard with a mass character lent the presidential elections an exceptional character. For one thing, the electoral struggle between the main competitors was close for the first time since the de Gaulle coup in 1958; the left" could have come to power. The workers would have seen the election of Mitterrand, the
Arlette Laguiller. 11
FRANCE candidate of the main workers formations (both parties and trade unions), as their victory. A Mitterrand victory would not have been able to freeze the class struggle for any length of time, but rather would have allowed for posing in completely new terms the question of what kind of oction should be launched. The new generation of vanguard militants now regrouping in the factories and among the student youth would have gone through the experience of seeing reformism administer a bourgeois state. The FCR further reasoned that even the election of Giscard d'Estaing, who could have only squeeked by narrowly, would not enable the French bourgeoisie, which lacks a clossical conservative party, to resolve its crisis of leadership. The long interval before the next legislative elections (scheduled for 1978) would have then posed in stark terms the question of how to continue the struggle and would have raised the perspective of a general strike to force the bourgeoisie to give in to the workers' demands. The primary objective that the FCR set for itself in the election was to prepare the workers -- and especially the workers vanguard -- for the tasks that would confront them after the elections. That meant running an electoral campaign without giving any credence to electoralism, without skirting the delicate and difficult problems involved. Lutte Ouvrière made a different choice. It decided to try to win some electoral credibility for the for left. In itself this is not an unworthy goal. In fact, it was important for distrust of Mitterrand to be expressed and registered on the electoral level, especially in the event of his election to office. And whatever criticism the Lutte Ouvrière campaign may deserve, from this point of view Arlette's 600,000 votes were important. But unfortunately, Lutte Ouvriere's search for electoral credibility led it to combine organizational sectarianism and political opportunism. According to the polls, 80 percent of those questioned saw Krivine's candidacy as a far-left candidacy, while only 40 percent saw Laguiller's that way. Laguiller, a militant woman worker, denounced capitalist exploitation and testified to the present conditions of women and workers. Many peaple identified with the LO campaign. But to achieve that goal, Lutte Ouvrière decided to depoliticize its campaign as much as possible -- in fact, to such an extent that it was more "popular" than "revolutionary. " Lutte Ouvrière's program involved a series of political concessions to the electoralist atmosphere that prevented LO from clearly posing the tasks that will confront the workers vanguard in the future. A comparison of the FCR and LO campaigns clearly illustrates this: * The nature of the themes put forward. Both campaigns denounced the capitalist system, and both expressed distrust of Mitterrand and called for continuing extroparliamentary struggle. But they did it in completely different ways - For LO, denunciation of the reformist character of Mitterrand's candidacy was based exclusively on Mitterrand's past as a bourgeois politician. For the FCR it was above all a matter of showing how the workers would have to go beyond the Common Program of the Union de la Gouche after the elections on very precise questions. It was from this standpoint that the FCR seized the opportunity presented by the elections to bring up the lessons of the French Popular Front of 1936 and of the Chilean experience. Likewise, by denouncing the formation of "unofficial" armed right-wing gangs (ufilizing documentation on the role they had been planning to play in quasi-state repression in 1968
12 and pointing out the presence of members of the fascist Ordre Nouveau group in Giscard d'Estaing's bodyguard) and by discussing the role of the army (and thus provoking a public response from the minister of the army), the FCR was able to pose in very specific terms before millions of workers the question of the role of the state and the necessity of dismantling it. Chile. The role of the army. These were points that the LO campaign carefully avoided mentioning. But it was not only on the most general questions of revolutionary strategy that Lutte Ouvriêre preferred to remain silent. Arlette Laguiller made denunciation of the condition of women in capitalist society one of the main axes of her campaign by defending women's right to abortion. That was necessary. But in its radio broadcasts devoted to the struggle of women, LO -- unlike the FCR - - preferred to remain silent on the question of the right of women under twenty-one years old to get abortions. The question of rights for minors is still a dangerous one to bring up in an electoral campaign. But the most striking example of the opportunism of the Lutte Ouvrière campaign came on the question of organizing the struggles of the future. Arlette Laguiller was a member of the strike committee at Credit Lyonnais during the bank strike that continued after Pompidou's death. The organization of this strike was remarkable. Not only were strike committees formed, some of them were brought under centralized coordination. Such a thing is still unique in the French workers struggles. Arlette was a participant in this experience. And today a debate on this question is going on within the trade-union movement, and especially among the workers vanguard. The Stalinist bureaucrats are particularly afraid of centralized strike committees becoming generalized, for that would place a big question mark over their ability to control workers struggles. Arlette did not breathe a word about this whole quesfion in her entire campaign. For its part, the FCR devoted one of its television broodcasts to the theme of strike committees, presenting as speakers a comrade who was active in the Lorraine miners strike, a leoder of the strike committee formed during the strike of electrical and gas workers in Brest, and a militant bank employee. The importance of self-organization of the workers (strike committees, workers self-defense, and so on) was one of the main axes of the FCR campaign. * Personalization and mass movement. The presidential elections are personalized to the highest possible degree. For the bourgeoisie, this is a powerful means of depoliticizing the electoral battle. The FCR tried to cut across this personalization by publicizing the organization behind the individual candidate, by bringing many rank-and-file militants to speak on the radio and television broadcasts (in fact, Krivine himself used less than half of his speaking time, "turning over" the remainder to militants of the women's movement, worker militants, a soldier, and a comrode from the Groupe Révolution Socialiste -- Socialist Revolution Group -- the Antilles section of the Fourth International), and by opening up compaign meetings to speakers from the floor. Lutte Ouvrière presented a candidate who exactly symbolized the kind of campaign the LO wanted to wage. Women and militant workers could identify personally with Laguiller more easily than with Krivine, who appeared as a "professional revolutionary. " LO played this to the hilt, concentrating its whole campaign around the personality of Arlette, pushing the organization to the background. ("Arlette, c'est chouette," or, roughly, "Arlette's the one, " was one of the main slogans Lutte Ouvrière members were writing on the walls.) Elector-
ally, this paid off. But it forced LO to push the tendency toward extreme personalization of bourgeois elections to the very limit. In a more general sense, the FCR constantly tied its electoral campaign to the mass work regularly carried out by its members when elections are not going on. It organized several mobilizations before the first round (like the May Day march and the abortion demonstration in Paris) and between the first and second rounds (like the Chile demonstration against the repressive trials). And it used its radio time during the clection to call for the organization of struggle (like the call for women to organize). Lutte Ouvrière has always refused to send its members into the moss moverents; it has stayed out of MLAC, the MLF (women's liberation movement), the Chile committees, the Committee to Defend Draftees, and so on. So this dimension was completely lacking in the LO campaign, thus further intensifying the personalization. Political Response and Electoral Response So LO and the FCR ran campaigns that were very different in both style and content. In the context of the Mitterrand groundswell that developed before the first round, these two campaigns appealed to different sorts of voters. Arlette Laguiller attracted a composite electorate, the addition of whose components enabled her total to reach 2.4 percent of the vote. It would be just os wrong to claim that this vote represented the brood workers vanguard as to claim that it represented only backward protest votes. A series of layers voted for Arlette because they felf they could identify with her: women who wanted to support her feminist indictment of society (some of LO's highest scores came in rural areas with no solid leftist tradition); populists who wanted to vote for the only candidate that was a worker and who appreciated her denunciation of the conditions of the exploited and her condemnation of "professional politicians"; but also members of the Communist party (the CP leadership estimates that 100,000 (Pers voted for LO on the first round) who were suspicious of Mitterrand and Socialist workers impressed by Arlette's class vehemence. This electorate is politically heterogeneous. A section of it (especially women) probably voted for Giscard on the second round, but the extent of this phenomenon should not be exaggerated. Another, more important, section voted LO to express revolutionary distrust of Mitterrand. A third section voted for Arlette out of class commitmen: and rejection of revolution, which was symbolized by the Krivine candidacy. In fact, the letters from readers published in the newspaper Lutte Ouvrière reflected essentially the first and third categories. In a general way, Lutte Ouvrière directed its campaign toward the levels of consciousness of "average" workers (and wo men), even if it had to adapt to their prejudices. This was not a temporary maneuver. It corresponds to the actual orientation of this organization, which is marked by a profound "economism." Arlette's electoral score illustrates the variety of elementary levels of consciousness that exists in France today. Krivine's vote was not only one-sixth as big as Laguiller's: it was also less than half as large as his vote in the 1969 presidential election, when 230,000 people voted for him. This is due to two factors. First, in 1969 Alain Krivine was more than the candidate of the Ligue Communiste (the former French section of the Fourth International, banned by Pompidou on
June 28, 1973). He was also the only candidate who represented the struggles of May '68. As the first far-left candidate to run in a presidential election, and as a private in the amy, he represented the "new dissidence." The sort of vote that went to Krivine in 1969 went to Laguiller or Dumont this time. But even more important, the voters that the FCR campaign was mainly addressing itself to were very sensitive to the temptation to vote for Mitterrand on the first round. In the letters sent to the FCR and in the campaign meetings themselves, the question being asked by militants -- and especially worker militants -- was not whether to vote for Krivine or Laguiller, but whether to vote for Krivine or Mitterrand. The Communist party was pushing the idea that Mitterrand's best chance to win was on the first round rather than the second. The broad workers vanguard, and especially the section of it that is politically oware and therefore closest to the ideas of the FCR, was very sensitive to this argument about "effectiveness. " Many of these people agreed with the FCR campaign that it was important to organize the distrust of Mitterrand and to prepare for the struggles of the future. But they thought that it was first necessary to ensure the election of the "single candidate of the left" and that to do this they had to vote Mitterrand on the first round. That was probably an extremely extensive political phenomenon. Between one-third and one-half of the people who attended FR campaign meetings held after the first round seemed to have voted for Mitterrand on May 5. So the "Alain vote" was much more homogeneous politically than the "Arlette vote. " Essentially, the Krivine vote represented a commitment to socialist revolution. Lutte Ouvrière today is not bothering with any subtleties of analysis. For LO the meaning of the Arlette-Alain vote is transparently obvious: the FCR represents the intellectual far-left in the throes of crisis; LO represents the workers vanguard in the heat of development. We have no intention of ignoring the weaknesses of our own campaign. We found it difficult to strike the proper balance between testimony about and denunciation of exploitation and oppression on the one hand and defining a perspective for the future on the other hand. Our modes of expression were sometimes a bit complex. We did not adequately explain the necessity of a revolutionary vote on the first round. The analysis of the political situation could have sometimes appeared premature and somewha "catastrophic. " But the paradox remains: The 1974 presidential campaign was by far the best electoral compaign we have ever waged. Most important, it got the biggest response among the working class. At the same time the electoral score was by far the least significant gain of the campaign. It was the first time that we were able to carry out such militant strect mobilizations during an clectoral campaign: there was the abortion demonstration called by MLAC (Movement pour la Liberté de l'Avortement et de la Contraception -Movement for Free Abortion and Contraception) despite the opposition of the reformist and centrist components of MLAC; there was the May Day demonstration, which drew nearly FCR contingent in May 1 demonstration in Paris.
FRANCE 40,000 people, attracting militants in the mass movements and some sections of the trade-union movement, despite the decision of the union bureaucracy to break with tradition and hold no May Day demonstration in 1974 so as not to disrupt the electoral campaign. Lutte Ouvriêre porticipated only symbolically in the MLAC demonstration. In the May Day demonstration LO restricted its participation to marching in its own contingent, separating itself from the mass movements. It was absent from the Chile committees and from the Committee to Defend Draftees. But this is on important ques-
The ranks of the army are beginning to move. For the first time a public appeal was put out to the condidates during an election by nearly two hundred active-duty soldiers in defense of their demands. This amounts to a test of strength with the military hierarchy and the Giscard government. (In the French army, any collective protest by soldiers is forbidThe meetings that were held during the election campaign were unprecedented for the French Trotskyist movement, both in ferms of the number of participants and in terms of the working-class composition of the audiences. The twenty-two central meetings of the FCR drew a total of more than 30,000 people! And this total leaves aside the nearly 200 local meetings that were held. The differences behween these meetings and the 1969 meetings were striking. The crowds were older; there were many more worker militants; there were very few curiosity-seekers leaving the meetings after Krivine "the stor" had spoken. There were animated and extremely political debates and discussions with members of the Communist party, the Socialist party, and the two big union federations, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail -- General Confederation of Labor) and CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail -- French Democratic Confederation of Labor). Symptomatically -- and contrary to what could have been feared -- the attendance, composition, and atmosphere of the meetings was not at all affected by the results of the first round or by the announcement that Krivine had gotten only 0.36 percent of the vote. The experience of the daily newspaper was also revealing. Prepared extremely hurriedly (we had only one week in which to make the decision to publish it), it rapidly developed an important place in the campaign. The total sales figures -- especially for the issues sold on newsstands -- are not yet available. But the general response to the paper was quite good. After the initial curiosity wore off, sales doclined somewhat on the campuses, but the strong point in distribution was in the factories. The circulation of the daily there was higher than the woekly Rouge and it attracted o new layer of worker-readers whose high political level is attested to by the letters the daily Rouge has received. After May 19 In spite of the considerable political impoct of the FCR campaign, the relatively low vote will most likely have some negative consequences. The working class (not to mention the journalistic world), steeped as it is in electoralism, is sensitive to the electoral credibility of an organization. But that is not the most important thing. In its campaign, the FCR stressed the problems that would arise in the event of a Mitterrand victory. If Mitterrand had won, the tasks of the workers vanguard would have been quite new and difficult. But the FCR hod also prepared to continue the struggle if Giscard d'Estaing won. The discussion of how to do that, alreody begun before the presidential elections, is now continuing. The discussion has been sharpened and deepened by the fact that no new elections are scheduled until 1978, by the death of the Gaullist party, and by the strengthening of the left. Ir is through this debate and discussion that the seeds planted by the Krivine campaign will bear fruit. 14
Furthermore, the emergence of an electorate of nearly a million voters crystallized around the far-left candidates demonstrates the current level of militancy. (The heterogeneity of the Arlette and Dumont vote is probably compensated for by the number of far-left votes that went to Mitterrand on the first round.) This debate and discussion must be able to regroup the broad workers vanguard that has emerged in the factories. But one of the most dangerous consequences of the results of the first round, the possible political evolution of Lutte Ouvrière, threatens to act as a brake on this process. Even before the election, Lutte Ouvrière was drifting in a certain direction. It defined itself as the proletarian tendency and characterized the rest of the far left as petty bourgeois in nature. A "class line, "Lutte Ouvrière said, separated it from all the other groups. This conception had led LO to some very serious instances of bureaucratic manipulation during the recent mobilization of the apprentices in the technical schools. Arlette's electoral score threatens to reinforce this drift by encouraging Lutte Ouvrière to accentuate the right-wing populism of its political orientation and the manipulative sectarianism of its organizational practices. During the campaign, LO refused to open up its meetings, notably to Jemalli Kemal, the symbolic "candidate" of the immigrant workers. A month has gone by since the first round. LO is claiming that its political audience is as lorge as its electoral audience (which can only reinforce its triumphalism) and is ignoring the other groups. (LO has just refused to sign a joint communiqué with Alain Krivine against the arrest in Toulon of four sailors on charges of having distributed "subversive" literature. The consequence of this attitude had already appeared af the opening of the election campaign. At that time Lutte Ouvrière rejected the proposal for a united candidacy around Charles Piaget, the best known leader of the strike at the Lip watch factory. (See INPRECOR, No. 0, p.3.) The balance sheet that can be drown of the presidential elections proves that the Piaget candidacy was the only one that could have allowed for the emergence of united committees in the factories and neighborhoods going beyond the circle of sympathizers of the revolutionary organizations. That would have changed many things, and it will be bad for everybody if Lutte Ouvrière continues with its current attitude. It would be oll the worse in that the 1974 presidential elecfions showed once again the necessity of united oction, of least if the for left is to rise to the tasks confronting it. And the confusion that continues to reign makes the debate and discussion especially urgent. The broad workers vanguard, while it hos asserted its existence, has also proved to be susceptible to the pressure of the Union de la Gauche. The Lambertist current (organized in the OCI-AJS, Organisation Communiste Internationaliste -- Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme -- Internationalist Communist Organization -Young Socialist Alliance), a sect of Trotskyist origin, reversed its 1973 position and called for a first-round vote for Mitterrand, It thus moved still further away from revolutionary politics. The PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié -- United Socialist party, a centrist formation) slid even more openly into the orbit of the Union de la Gauche, with PSU leader Michel Rocard adopting the perspective of entering the Mitterrand government. The "Mao-Stalinist" orgonizations (l'Humanité Rouge, the Communist party Marxist-Leninist, Front Rouge and the Revolutionary Communist party, Ligne Rouge, etc.) sank still further into their sectarian isolation by calling for abstention in the elections. The ultraleftists lost all coherence during the elections. Revolution! (a group that originated in a split from the Ligue Communiste) defined Mitterrand's candidacy as purely bourgeois and nevertheless called for a vote for him, thus sowing opportunist confusion -- to say the very least. Strengthen unity in action and deepen the political debate in order to recompose the workers vanguard. These are the tasks that the FCR will now work for.
ITALY THE DIVORCE
The May 12 divorce referendum in Italy ended in a spectacular defeat for the Christian Democracy and the Movimento
Sociale Italiano (MSI -- Italian Social Movement, the neofascist movement). The proposal to abolish the law granting divorce was defeated by a very clear majority (around 60 percent of the voters). The results are even more significant if a few detailed figures are taken into account: In Turin, the
"No" vote reached 80 percent; in Genoo, despite the hue and cry raised by the reactionaries around the kidnapping of the judge Sossi by the Red Brigades, the "No" vote was 75 percent; even in Naples, where in 1946 the monarchists won a referendum and where the fascists have been trying for years to rebuild a base, the antidivorce forces were beaten.
All the fears of a shift toward a "Yes" vote among the CP voters proved to be unfounded. (The party bureaucrats themselves raised such fears in order to justify the moderate campaign they waged.) The Christian Democracy suffored a setback and the church was compelled to recognize the degree to which its grip on the Catholic country par excellence has been weakened. The pope did not hide his disappointment: He never expected such a thing from his "well beloved" Italy. The operation launched by the most reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie in an attempt to develop a petty-bourgeois and lumpenproletarian mass base to use against the working class has failed. At the same time the resounding victory of the "No" vote in the referendum showed that the working class understood the general political stakes involved in the confrontation and that sections of the bourgeoisic itself were disinalined to go along with clerico-fascist operations that they believe to be unrealizable in a country profoundly marked both by the rise of the working class in 1968 and subsequent years and by the mobilization and political maturation of the most varied social layers. The bourgeoisie will now suffer an exacerbation of its crisis in regard to both short-term solutiors and long-term perspecfives. Most probably, the composition of the government will not be changed in the next few weeks. Nevertheless, the inevitable crisis of leadership of the Christian Democracy combined with the more aggressive attitude of the Socialists (who regard the referendum results as compensation for the concessions they were forced to make on the economic level) create a precarious situation that cannot drag on forever. As for long-term solutions, on the one hand the bourgeoisie cannot give up its effort to make the working class bear the costs of the structural crisis (and of the conjunctural crisis that promises to come soon), and it must therefore find a new line of attack against the demands of the masses. But the failure of the operation aimed at winning a reactionary mass base, as well as the crisis of the state apparatus, will force the bourgeoisie to reconstruct ex novo a means of strength-
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