[On June 27 the French Communist and Socialist parties signed a joint governmental program, widely hailed as the rebirth of the Popular Front of the 1930s. The following article analyzing the reasons for the accord and its likely future is reprinted from the July 8 issue of Rouge, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Hardly a month and a half ago, things were not going so well between the Communist and Socialist parties. They were vying and grappling with each other. The SP, emboldened by its success in the abstention on the Common Market referendum, proposed to the non-Communist left a united candidacy in the first-round legislative elections. At the time, with great foresight, Georges Marchais wrote in l'Humanité, "Today, everything looks as though the SP's basic aim is to reduce our influence and compel us to play the role of a balancing force, all the while envisaging an agreement with our party." Well? Will this agreement, which we are told is as important as the Tours conference that founded the Communist party, definitively wipe out the ditferences of yesteryear? Will the political plans of the CP and the SP, so clearly divergent only a few weeks ago, suddenly find a deep common confluence, a basis for solid agreement?
Why the Agreement?
The tactical accord concluded on June 27 has its origins in two common CP-SP assumptions:
1) The sharpness of the regime's political crisis, as evidenced by the bourgeoisie's failure to come up with a back-up team for a change-over regime (the Chaban-Messmer patchwork can in no way cover this up), and, on the other hand, the sharp- 894
ness of the social crisis, as evidenced by the continuing high level of working-class militancy on the eve of the vacation period, both prove that the situation is ripe for power intrigues.
These politicians, whose mental horizons are limited by the sad level of elections, feel themselves "called" to power; they feel that from now on they must enter the game with the maximum number of winning cards in hand. Otherwise, others will pass them by. Thus, program in hand, they get set at the starting line, already putting forth guarantees of their seriousness, their progressive good faith, their ability to govern. They declare themselves ready, whether or not elections take place. But for all that, they are not such great executives, nor are they very daring. If they sign a governmental program and not just an electoral agreement, it is because the latter would have lacked credibility in face of the struggle of workers directly confronting the strong state and its police. They had to respond in terms of power, partly opening the door to socialism. If they signed so quickly, it was not so much because they wanted to, but because the advanced gangrene of the governmental team (rumors, confirmed slightly later, of Chaban's resignation) and the distant murmur of impending elections pushed them unmercifully.
When Marchais and Mitterrand stand sipping champagne on the early morning of the night of June 27, they are not making history, but only reflecting it by distorting it; because on the French electoral field, the tension of class struggle is growing. That Mitterrand should have gone "so far" in his compromise with the CP shows that he is not in control of the basic forces compelling the agreement. Only yesterday, he turned his back on the Communists; now, he goes so far that he frightens the notables of the ex- SFIO [Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière- French Section of the Workers (Second) International], many of whom were elected against
Communist candidates. That Marchais should have made such concessions, compared to what the party wanted at first, allowing the minimum number of nationalizations to fall from twenty-five factories to fifteen, proves the same thing about him.
2) The second common assumption of the two parties is that neither can achieve its aims without the other. For the SP, signing the pact was the price it had to pay in order again to present itself-to a wide section of the progressive electorate that has shunned the SP for years— as a sincerely leftist political force purged of past errors, cleansed of the role the Socialists played in the Algerian war, of Guy Mollet's presence in de Gaulle's first government and of his sending a contingent endowed with special powers to Algeria, etc. (The list is long.) Besides, in the long run, the SP seeks to assure itself of being able to play leap-frog, of using the CP's back, and its members, to come to power in 1976.
For the CP, signing the agreement is a guarantee of a favorable relationship of forces with the SP. It shows the leftist voters that it is Mitterrand who has to pass under the Caudine Forks of advanced democracy and not the other way around, Marchais bending under those of Bonaparte- Mitterrand
Explosive Contradictions
They realize that from now on they have to scheme for power, and to do this they need each other. But apart from this weak common ground, already their plans are different. These disagreements impose on the governmental program two contradictions that in time threaten to become explosive.
1) First of all, the CP-SP program is "united" only in appearance. In a deeper sense, in its vacillations, its shame-facedness, its tiny nuances, and especially in the tactical function each party assigns to it in relation to the other and to the electoral sphere, the program faithfully reflects the relative incompatibility of their plans. So how can anyone take seriously as an axis around which to build proletarian power in France a program whose key part-nationalizations — was the product of endless bargaining and is only the result of a lousy shopkeeper's compromise? How can such a program, adopted only after a struggle with knives drawn and by means of a system of unprincipled reciprocal concessions be anything logical and constructive for the masses?
2) Furthermore - and this is the second contradiction-in adopting this program, neither renounces its own basic goal-to govern on the back of the other: the SP by making the CP its stepping-stone for the 1976 presidential elections, by refining its basis of maneuver with the CP in an electoral test so as to effectively institute a Brandt-style or a Swedish socialism in which a coopted working class would gather the crumbs of the expansion; the CP by using the SP and the left wing of the Radicals (the recent meeting of Marchais and Fabre, head man of the latter) as an indispensable springboard to that fateful 51 percent.
The party bureaucrats really believe their traditional blather about winning the middle classes. When they sketch out a cross section of society, adopting a program for each layer, when they hitch the working class to the lurching wagon of the middle classes that waver endlessly between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, when they refuse to initiate an offensive policy toward the middle classes, calling on them to follow the proletariat instead of the other way around, when they do all these things, it is not merely to justify their betrayals. They really believe in the possibility of a regime under Communist hegemony, but neither bourgeois nor proletarian, a regime in which the alliance of classes excludes only the monopolist bourgeoisie, only a fraction of the ruling class. This reformist and utopian tactic of the gradual conquest of power, which can only result in the Communist ministers implementing the policy of a fraction of the bourgeoisie, serves it as a guarantee against the working class and implies a privileged alliance with the SP.
The basic respective preoccupation of the CP and the SP in relation to each other is to build, beginning today, a relationship of forces leading to the day when they believe they ought to govern together. On this question, the contradictions between their respective plans is explosive, as many polemies have shown since the signing of the agreement.
July 31,1972
Mutual Sabotage
On the SP's part, Mitterrand set the tone the day after the agreement was signed when he spoke to the Vienna congress of the Socialist International: "Our fundamental objective role is to rebuild a great Socialist party on the ground occupied by the CP itselfto demonstrate that of the 5,000,000
1:20
MITTERRAND: Sipping champagne with a longtime enemy.
Communist voters 3,000,000 can vote Socialist! That is the reason for this agreement. ... The reconstruction of the historic bloc by escaping from Communist leadership, by the confrontation of analysis and action in the field; these are the only tactical means that may bring about our aim: the revival of the great Socialist party, boldly oriented to the left so as to recover its authenticity, but also standing in first place at the head of the masses."
It couldn't be more clear. And l'Humanité regrets the cynicism of this false brother Mitterrand, who seeks to win over the Communist voters, instead of the potential "thousands of voters" who are still under the sway of reaction.
And the second tolling of the bell, tending in the same direction, at the Socialist meeting: "We are definitely not alone with the Communists. Already many Radicals are thinking it over. Already many democrats understand the choice confronting them. One is not alone when one is joined by eight, ten, twelve, or - why not? - thirty million Frenchmen." (Mitterrand speaking last weekend to a convention of SP officeholders.) These harangues are aimed at reassuring a whole wing of the Socialist party that is virulently anti-Communist, that finds the price paid for the agreement too heavy, and that is afraid of the campaign of the traditional right, which will accuse them of bargaining with the devil.
On the part of the CP, there is great uneasiness at seeing the SP cease to be a simple apparatus, a simple general staff. Behind the smiles lies distrust. And the referendum - in which the CP did not hesitate to scuttle unity in order to prevent Mitterrand from too rapidly reinflating the Socialist balloon - is not so long ago.
So we have here not so much the reign of unity as some close in-fighting, each attacking the other so as to strengthen itself. This battle, symbolized by the recent municipal elections in Arles in which the Communist candidate was elected without Socialist support, threatens to get out of the control of these adversaries who pretend to be comrades. The referendum proved that. And the marriage of convenience, concluded, as Mitterrand himself said, "under the rules of separate property," threatens to be a tumultuous one.
Another Execution in Iran
According to a government communiqué published July 16, a member of a "subversive group," Aliyar Reyhavi, has been executed by a firing squad in Ahwaz, in the southern part of Iran after being sentenced to death by a military tribunal. The victim was said to have entered Iran last August from Iraq.
"The newspapers in Teheran indicate that Aliyar Reyhavi belonged to a 'commando' group of four men whose mission was to blow up a highway bridge and tunnel in the Ilam region, some fifty kilometers from the border between Iraq and Iran," according to Le Monde July 18.