[The following article appeared in the February 10 issue of Rouge, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The least you can say is that the majority does not have nerves of steel. "Whatever the outcome of the battle," a fiery Sanguinetti told an assembly of UDR [Union de Démocrates pour la République - Union of Democrats for the Republic, the Gaullists cadres, "don't ever be discouraged. Since this country was born, it has had some terrible moments. But it has always pulled out of them. If we are not victorious tomorrow, we will again fall back on what has always been Gaullism's real calling: retreating to fight another day."
As for UDR General Secretary Alain Peyrefitte, he quickly became very polite to the reformers, and even to the Socialists, whom he offered temporary ministerial posts— if only they would break with the CP!
It seems the news is really alarming. The latest SOFRES Société Fran- çaise d'Enquêtes par
Sondages -
French Association of Public Opinion Surveys] poll showed 47 percent intending to vote for the left (an increase of 1 percent) and only 36 percent for the URP (a decrease of 2 percent). The gap widens.
As Le Figaro sadly editorialized: "Of the three possible variants - the present coalition retaining its majority, the balance of power swinging to the reformers, and the united left winning a majority - the first has lost a bit of its credibility. And if the second now appears more likely, the third, complete victory for the left, can no longer be excluded as totally unrealistic."
What kind of political situation will result from the coming elections? What new opportunities and responsibilities will it present to revolutionists? We must now ask these questions. Because whatever the importance of our 238
election campaign, it means nothing unless it prepares us for the postelection period, when the class struggle will leave the sterile ground of bourgeois parliamentarism and return to its preferred terrain: the factories and the street.
Of all the possible variants, one seems to us to be almost completely out of the question: the pure and simple return to the status quo. All indications are that the majority will suffer some kind of defeat. The depth of this defeat will determine the new political situation. In this respect, two possibilities must be considered.
Reformers Hold the Balance
The first possibility, and the most likely one, is that the URP will lose its absolute majority in parliament, the united left will reach or slightly exceed a plurality, and the reformers will hold the balance of power. This variant corresponds-irony of the polls, no doubt-to the secret prediction made this week by the chief director of the Ministry of the Interior.
What would be the political situation after such a vote?
The Pompidou regime would be seriously weakened. Internal divisions within the majority, temporarily concealed in order to counter the Union of the Left's offensive, would be freshly exacerbated. Independent Republicans and Duhamelian centrists, less badly damaged by universal suffrage than the UDR, would loudly clamor for a redistribution of posts. Inside the UDR itself, clique warfare would again be in full swing. Even though the electoral setback might not have really been so stinging, it still might precipitate the outfit's fracturing into hostile tendencies.
The extension of the majority to include Lecanuet's centrists, done at great cost, would still more exacerbate the coalitions' heterogeneity.
This frayed and divided regime would necessarily have to take unpopular measures that the Messmer government has put off because of the elections. In a world situation marked by a resurgence of the monetary crisis and an intensification of competition, it would be necessary to try to stifle the galloping inflation and to push forward attempts to rationalize French capitalism.
The situation would be even more precarious in that the government would be faced with a rather hostile working class. The majority's electoral defeat, the relative strengthening of the Union of the Left, would in fact stimulate popular militancy. This would be registered all the more firmly in struggles, since all hopes of achieving change through the ballot box would have been disappointed and would become in any case a dead letter until 1976.
For six months the CP and the CGT [Confédération Générale des Travailleurs - General Confederation of Labor, the country's largest trade-union federation] have been popularizing the slogans of the common program, especially those in the chapter called "a better life." They have been knocking themselves out to convince the workers that these demands are wellfounded and realistic. It is impossible that the workers would wait another three years to put them into effect. What they couldn't get at the ballot box they will try to get in struggle.
A Situation of Partial Upsurges
This situation would be highly favorable for revolutionists. Of course, the reformist leaders will not sit around with folded arms. Séguy head of the CGT] has already declared that if a reactionary government is reestablished, the CGT will take the initiative and launch struggles. But then it would be possible to outflank the apparatus, both on the goals and the forms of struggle.
As to goals, the workers' vanguard will put forward, as it has done in the past, unifying demands (egalitarian wage scales, and so on) that challenge the capitalist organization of labor.
Gaining support around these demands and utilizing, by going beyond them, certain aspects of the common program, revolutionists will press agitation for workers' control.
In the chapter entitled "Democracy in the Factory," the common program projects a certain number of measures aimed at limiting the employers' absolute power. In the paragraph called "control of labor" it says: "The factory and work-place committees and the personnel delegates - including delegates from the shops and departments wherever these exist in the factory - must be consulted on all decisions involving hiring and firing, distribution of positions, transfers, classification of workers, setting of the work pace, and more generally, all working conditions. ... Implementation of these decisions shall be held in abeyance until agreement is reached among all concerned parties."
In previous issues, we have stressed all the ambiguities of these formulations. Suppose, as is inevitable, that the "parties concerned" fail to "reach agreement." Then who makes the decision?
The common program implicitly concedes that the employer will decide. If the parties really can't reach agreement, it says on page 109, then "the employees'
representatives can appeal to the labor courts."
Starting from the criticism of these equivocal formulations, and strongly conscious of the workers' democratic aspirations, revolutionists will press for workers' control with veto power over firings, hirings, transfers, distribution of occupational positions, the way wages are paid, the work pace, health and security conditions, in short, all working conditions.
This control must be exercised by control committees composed of delegates from the shops, the assembly lines, or the departments, democratically elected by their fellow workers, responsible to them, and recallable at any time. Their functioning must involve opening the companies' books and management records, as the common program itself calls for. The control committees must be accorded a sufficient time during each workday to consult with the workers and to discharge their duties.
As far as the forms of struggle are concerned, revolutionists will redouble their efforts to force the bureaucracy to accept the democratic organization of strikes, through the formation of strike committees elected and empowered to act by all the workers, organized and unorganized. As in the past, they will try to establish an alliance in struggle of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie by setting up support committees.
The fight for workers' control and for the democratic organization of struggles will permit the strengthening of the workers' capacity and desire for self-management, indispensible preconditions for the seizure of power.
And If the Union of the Left Wins
Official spokesmen for the majority claim that a victory for the Union of the Left would precipitate an open crisis for the regime. In his article published in the Revue des deux mondes, Pierre Messmer put it down in black and white: If the Union of the Left wins, the government team will not step down. Georges Pompidou will not invite François Mitterrand to carry out a program he considers diametrically opposed to his own. The President of the Republic will try to gain time through a whole series of stalling maneuvers. The ruling class and its state apparatus will use this time to provoke chaos and to turn the situation around.
Already, Giscard d'Estaing [the finance minister has threatened: "I stress these words," he told a group of URP cadres. "The overthrow of the structures of the French economy that have been proposed to us, the setting up of an expropriating bureaucracy ... would break our economic spirit and create, within the space of eighteen months, the problems of unemployment and foreign deficit."
The ruling class will not allow the country to be thrown into depression and panic. It will not hesitate to activate the fascist groups that today lie dormant inside the state apparatus and the UDR.
This refusal to submit to the 'verdict of universal suffrage' is very dangerous for the ruling class. It will do more to demystify legalism and bourgeois electoralism than 100,000 propaganda campaigns waged by the revolutionary far left. It will at one stroke provoke the indignation and anger of thousands of workers.
These workers will seek to impose by direct action what they could not attain by following the rules of the bourgeois game.
The class struggle in France will then move to a basic test of strength, in the short term, between the workers fighting to establish a Union of the Left government and the big bourgeoisie, determined at all costs to block the Mitterrand-Marchais team.
In this variant, the revolutionists will have to foster the formation and centralization of popular committees uniting the workers and all tendencies aiming at driving Pompidou out of power (by mass demonstrations in the streets and by strikes) and at instituting a workers' government in his place. The sharp tension of the political and social climate will make agitating for and organizing workers' self-defense especially crucial.
Prepare for a Rise of Struggles
This solution, as we said, is very dangerous for the ruling class, given the current relationship of class forces. Not only because it would demolish the masses' legalistic illusions, but also because the outcome of the test of strength is not at all assured. That is why, whatever the current bombast of Messmer, Peyrefitte, and Company, it is not at all obvious to us that the bourgeoisie will take this road in the event of a Union of the Left victory.
If they can't bring off some kind of compromise, especially, for example, by buying off Radical and Socialist deputies, it is not impossible that they would prefer appealing directly to Mitterrand, rather than risk under the worst conditions a basic test of strength with the working class.
The President of the Republic would then hope that he could sufficiently discredit the Union of the Left government to get away with dissolving the Chamber of Deputies within three months and assuring the UDR's return to power.
It goes without saying that his relations with the leftist government would be marked by great conflict. The political tasks would then revert to the preceding case: forming popular committees to force the demands to be met and make Pompidou either submit or resign. Again a test of strength would be likely in a short time.
But whatever the results of the March 4 and 11 balloting, one thing is sure: In any case, we must prepare for a new upsurge of struggle, a development that will bring about a situation where it will be possible for the rank and file to outflank the reformist leaderships, a situation that will be favorable for revolutionists rooting themselves the among workers.
While today the reformist apparatuses have the initiative and the revolutionists are generally constrained to base their policies around the apparatuses, a completely different situation is on the agenda for the spring of 1973. Starting now, the revolutionists must prepare for it.