Dy rierre rank
For revolutionary Marxists it is a well-established truth that elections that take place in a bourgeois-democratic framework give a distorted picture of the real class relationships and their evolution. There has hardly ever been a better illustration of this than the French elections of March 4 and 11.
Social tensions in France have remained very high since May 1968. There is no social layer that has put its hopes in parliament or in the other elected assemblies. Each has resorted to street demonstrations, not all of them peaceful. Strikes have nearly always been accompanied by factory occupations and more than once by the workers' locking up the management or the foremen. Some have openly flouted the law (like the doctors who declared that they performed abortions, and got away with it).
It was to channel the push to the left and the revolutionary upsurge that the leaders of the Communist party and the Socialist party formed the Union of the Left and drew. up the Common Program, hoping in this way to avert revolutionary explosions and to achieve social transformation solely by parliamentary means. But the elections make it look as though nothing had changed for years, and even as though things had gone back to what they were like before 1967. The majority lined up around Pompidou remained the majority in these elections, even though the country is generally sick of it.
To pull it off, the majority had to resort to a combination of devices: a fraudulent electoral law (unequal districting, some deputies in the coun tryside being elected with one-fifth as many votes as those in the cities), fake votes in what is left of the colonial empire, shameless horse-trading among the bourgeois parties between the first and second rounds, and finally a really crass campaign even including participation by the president of the republic.
Arguments were put forward reminiscent of those of the last century lining up the peasantry against the 370
"commies"; it wasn't a question of "convincing," but rather of finding a few dozen thousand imbeciles, since the outcome would depend on some 200 votes in some 150 districts. Remember also that the outgoing majority refused to lower the voting age to eighteen, thus eliminating the votes of several hundred thousand youths between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one.
The table on the opposite page shows the vote results in the two rounds.
The Majority's Pyrrhic Victory
That's what Mitterrand called the majority's victory, and he's right. For one thing, the majority suffered big setbacks in the industrial centers (where de Gaulle personally had some support), in the developing regions, and among the youth. Within the majority the real Gaullists, the UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la Ré- publique - Union of Democrats for the Republic], suffered the greatest losses (in the old National Assembly they had an absolute majority; they lost about 100 seats this time).
Their partners (the Independent Republicans and the Democracy and Progress Center), whose losses were not so great, secretly rejoiced, because they hope to be better off in the altered majority. They also hope that a new parliamentary majority that includes the reformers will be formed. It is possible that the latter will be handed a few ministries in exchange for withdrawing their candidates on the second round; but in the most general sense, this has its disadvantages: It is not good for the bourgeoisie that it is not publicly putting forward an alternative solution within its own ranks, that it constitutes a bloc confronting the parties that claim to represent socialism and the working class, and that cannot themselves come up with any alternative except in a situation that would be almost desperate for the bourgeoisie.
Further, the majority felt the wind of defeat; it knows it survived only through trickery. Disagreements and friction within it are inevitable. Pompidou is not de Gaulle, who even in May 1968 did not suffer a single defection by a Gaullist deputy, whereas since Pompidou became president, several defections have taken place and several divergent factions have appeared.
Since there will be many national and international problems, the coming government will inevitably be torn between a certain necessity to make concessions to the masses, and the strongly reactionary tendency that dominates the majority. We won'thave to wait long to see that-except on the question of repression - the regime will not be the "strong state" it aspires to be.
The Left Vote
The Union of the Left made unquestionable electoral progress, but not as much as its leaders had hoped for. They thought they would return to an assembly something like the one that came out of the 1967 elections. But a comparison with that year is not really accurate. In 1967 there was no Common Program between the CP and the SP; there was just a vague declaration, to which the then unsplit Radical party adhered, that committed itself to nothing. That is why on the second round in 1967 many centerbourgeois voters voted for the SP candidates.
This time, to the overwhelming majority of the bourgeoisie the five-year pact signed between the SP and the CP appeared as a mortal danger. It seemed to them that voting Socialist was the same thing as voting Communist. The Union of the Left was not a popular front.1 By its class nature.
1. To claim, as some do, that the Union of the Left is a new popular front on the pretext that the "Left Radicals" are in it, is to confound words with real substance. In 1936 the Radical party, even if in decline, was still the main party of the French bourgeoisie. The Popular Front was also openly supported by important sectors of French capitalism, for both national and international reasons.
On the other hand, the "Left Radicals" today do not represent a social force and do not constitute a political force: they
The same goes for the Socialist
Ine same goes for the socialist voter. The meaning of this vote was not the same in 1967 and 1973. Except in a few areas, the Socialist voters followed directives to shift to the CP candidates to a much greater extent than in the past.
The SP made gains above all at the expense of the Gaullists and the reformers, only slightly at the expense of the CP and the PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifié - United Socialist party] (PSU lost to SP especially in the Paris area). While the SP was the big beneficiarv of the rise of the masses. the iciary of the rise of the masses, the CP marked time. That will pose a serious political problem to the CP members, beginning with its leadership. For years now the CP has had the strategic perspective of establishing "advanced democracy" by parliamentary means, through a duly arrivedat agreement with the SP. Now, with this accord signed and with the masses moving to the left, it is not the CP but the hitherto anemic SP that got the benefits and all but overtook the CP.
This is a problem that we ourselves must study because there are many elements to it, but the basic thing that gives rise to it is quite clear. That 46 percent of the vote in elections to a bourgeois parliament went to candidates claiming to be for socialism testifies to the strong pressure that exists among the masses, but also to the limitations of an electoralist policy. Faced with all the pressures of capitalist society, it is nearly impossible to win the missing few percentage points electorally. In fact, it is necessary to take power by extraparliamentary means in order to convince this lacking percentage. But the Socialist and Stalinist leaders, imbued with parliamentary cretinism, are incapable of understanding this.
The Far Left
The PSU definitely got some votes are parasites, freeloaders. In 1936 the votes were divided this way: Radical party, 14.4%; Socialist party, 18.6%; Communist party, 12.7%. Today, the "Left Radicals" get only 1.43% of the vote. Moreover, it must be taken into account that the Radicals did not run their own candidates against the CP and SP. as they did in 1936, but ran on forty slots the SP leaders gave them. By themselves, they definitely would have gotten less than 1 percent.
FIRST ROUND
PARTY
Communist Party Socialist Party and Left Radicals PSU and Far Left Reformers Various Center-Left URP (UDR. Independent Republicans, CDP) Various Majority Various Right
SECOND ROUND
PARTY
CP. SP, PSU, Left Radicals UDR. Independ. Rep.. CDP. Various Right DR, Independ. Rep., CDP, Various Right * Of which the Left Radicals received 1.43%
VOTES
PERCENT
5,026,417
21.28
4,523,399
19.16*
776,717
3.29
2,965,947
12.56
649,855
2.75 35.54+
8,224,193 779,259
3.30 2.79
660,186
SEATS
PERCENT 45.3
46.1 46.1
275 975
+Of which the UDR received 24%; Independent Republicans, 7.01%; CDP, 3.81%.
from supporters of the far left in places where the far left was not running candidates. But there can be no confusion about the politics of this organization. During the campaign, the PSU showed itself to be nothing but an adjunct of the Union of the Left. This was especially clear in what Rocard said after the first round. 2 Compared with its past performance, the PS U lost votes both to the SP and to the far left; during the campaign it showed itself to be a greatly weakened force in comparison to years gone by, but it remains and will remain as an element of confusion that will not fail to be harmful for building the mass revolutionary party at a later stage in the radicalization of the workers.
The candidates of the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvrière got about 300,000 votes, about 1.5% to 2.5% generally, with a few exceptions going as high as 3% or 4%, and even, in one case, 5%. The campaigns waged by the Ligue and Lutte Ouvrière were in no sense electoralist and ran up against many impediments. (By an administrative maneuver the Ligue was denied the right to go on television; Lutte Ouvrière was not allowed to hold a meeting in the Palais des Sports; in some districts, there was no listing on the ballot.)
Over and above the Ligue's important meetings in many cities, there were also small meetings all over the country and many actions linking the electoral campaign to various struggles that arose. Obviously, the numerical score is not the important thing. That does not express the politicization that could be observed among the audiences we do not usually run into in the activity of our organization.
Apart from the youth-our daily milieu - there were older workers, including members of the CP, who had no illusions about the Union of the Left and its program and asked questions about how to achieve socialism, on what a socialist society would be like, and so on. This never happened in the election campaigns of the past.
In the coming weeks we will find out what Pompidou will do in the aftermath of these elections and also what the political and trade-union organizations will do. All the problems of class struggle, centered for months around the electoral questions, will now assert themselves much more clearly.
Correction
Our March 12 issue contained two documents on the Irish elections reprinted from the Irish Trotskyist paper The Plough, published by the Revolutionary Marxist Group. The RMG informs us that the last paragraph on page 287 inaccurately indentified Dr. Thornley as a "Republican- Labour candidate" when "Irish Labour party candidate with Republican pretensions" would have been more correct.
Notes
2. The CP leadership withdrew on the second round in favor of Rocard. They did this only in self-defense, because they consider the small formations bothersome elements in the control the big organizations exercise over the masses. But they did it to show that they would play the "democratic" game, in order to avoid the risk of losing second-round votes from Socialists who would have been offended by the CP running against Rocard