[The following article, entitled "Who Benefits From the Union of the Left?' appeared in the February 3 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The political offensive of the government majority, which was announced with great fanfare at the beginning of January and for which the drums have been beating for three weeks, has been a failure: It has failed to change the way the French people plan to vote. On January 22, as on December 22, 45 percent planned to vote for the Union of the Left, according to IFOP [Institut Français de l'Opinion Publique-French Public Opinion Institute] (46 percent according to SOFRES [Société Française d' Enquêtes par Sondages - French Association of Public Opinion Surveys]).
This failure shows the extent of popular discontent. It is an indication of the French people's desire for change.
The radicalization, whose effects have been visible for years now in various struggles, is definitely being registered in an electoral swing to the left.
On the electoral plane, the primary beneficiary of this swing is the Socialist party. According to IFOP, 23 percent now plan to vote for the SP and the left Radicals,* as opposed to 20 percent for the CP. This "socialist upswing" is confirmed by various region-
*The Movement des Radicaux de Gauche (Movement of Left Radicals), headed by Robert Fabre. This group formerly called itself the Movement de la Gauche Radicale Socialiste (Movement of the Radical Socialist Left). Following a successful court challenge by the Parti Radical Socialiste (Radical Socialist party), headed by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, it was ordered on January 17, 1973, to change its name. - IP 180
GEORGES POMPIDOU
al polls. François Mitterrand thus appears close to passing the first test of his way to power-"restoring balance" on the left by gaining a new audience for the Social Democratic party.
One can remember how, at the congress of the "Socialist International" in Vienna, he bragged that this new audience would be found among the CP's electorate. At the time, he gave the figure of three million as the number of Communist voters who were apt to be won over.
But it is not in those waters that the SP is doing its spectacular fishing. The CP's electorate is remaining faithful to Georges Marchais. It is to his right that Mitterrand is winning votes — at the expense of the Gaullists and the reformers. Those defecting from the majority are obviously transferring their votes to the most moderate sector of the Union of the Left.
But if the "socialist upswing" is clear on the electoral level, it is far less clear in terms of the SP's organizational strength and the base it has acquired. On this level, the SP was too low to start with for it not to make some progress; thus, socialist sections have appeared here and there in a few factories. But its capacities for giving organizational shape to social forces and for carrying out mass mobilizations remain ridieulously weak. Its weight in social struggles is insignificant. For the most part, the SP remains a party of prominent figures and of voters, not a party of activists.
Let's leave it up to bourgeois journalists, blinded by electoralism, to be naive enough to believe that the swing to the left will aid only the SP. Marxists know that such a phenomenon represents a differentiated process that in various ways affects all left-wing organizations.
According to the polls, the CP is enjoying the full backing of its constituency but is not benefiting from any appreciable influx of new voters. It is on the activist level that it is capitalizing on the general push to the left. L'Humanité is making a big thing out of a sizable flow of new members into the party. Compared to the number of cards issued at the end of January 1972, the present results are sometimes two or three times higher. The influence of the mass organizations controlled by the CP is likewise increasing, as the latest results of the elections in the professional organizations show.
While the relationship of forces is evolving in favor of the SP on the electoral plane, it is evolving in favor of the CP in terms of organizational and mass mobilization capabilities.
But here, too, the process is contradictory. While the CP is winning new forces, it will have to reckon with the suspicious attitude of thousands of working-class militants who are too experienced to swallow without gagging the fairy tale about parliamentary paths to socialism. They know about the precedents of 1936, 1945, and 1968. They can see the example of Allende's Chile at this very moment. They have been able to reflect on the way the leaders of the Union of the Left have reacted to the January government offensive: Once proudly presented as a transitional program toward socialism, the common program was systematically interpreted in an increasingly restrictive sense, until finally it stands revealed for what it is —and incoherent program for arranging the bourgeois order.
Part of the workers' vanguard, probably a limited part, will express its distrust by abstaining. The rest will, without enthusiasm and without illusions, vote for the Union of the Left, in some cases starting with the first ballot, because they feel that this is perhaps the way to clean out the ovarn
FRANCOIS MITTERRAND
UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la République - Union of Democrats for the Republic] mafia, and that in any case one must register one's opposition. These vanguard workers are particularly open to our explanations, as the success of our meetings indicates. Tomorrow, as disillusioned supporters of the Union of the Leit, they will be the architects of the movement to break loose from it.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, we must prepare ourselves for a new upsurge in struggles.
The most probable hypothesis, we say, is a clear defeat for the Gaullist- Centrist coalition, nevertheless without stripping it of its majority, whether broadened to include the reformers or not. The defeat of the coalition in power and its possible enlargement will exacerbate its internal divisions and the instability of the regime. Simultaneously, the victory of the Union of the Left will give an impulse to popular combativity.
Since any new solution on an elec- February 19, 1973
toral level will be impossible until 1976, the workers will tend with all the more determination to get involved in social struggies, since their hope for change through the ballot box will have been frustrated. The postelection period will be a time for upsurge in struggies of all kinds. All the more so inasmuch as the government will have to pay for the eiectoral generosities of its predecessor.
If the Union of the Left geis a majority, then a full-fledged crisis of the regime will break out: The political orientation of Georges Pompidou and that of the Union of the Left stand in contradiction to each other. And Pompidou is not a man who gives in easily. His dilatory maneuvers, tied in with the undermining efforts of the big bourgeoisie, could give rise to a massive exiraparliamentary reaction by the workers that goes way beyond the bounds set by the reformist high command. From now on, the revolutionary communists are preparing for these two contingencies.