[The following declaration was published in the April 12 issue of Rouge, the French Trotskyist weekly, under the title, "Vive le Front Communiste Révolutionnaire." The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Profound upheavals are on the agenda in France. The growing rise of workers struggles, the challenges to management rights on the job, the mobilizations of student and worker youth against military enrollment, unemployment, and superexploitation, are widening the breach opened up in May 1968.
These struggles of the working class and the youth express a combativity that has successfully resisted both repression and co-optation. They occur in the context of a deepening of the crisis of the strong state that originated in the coup of 1958— a crisis of institutions, of the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus, as seen in the courts, the army, and the police.
In this context the presidential elections take on a very special significance. For millions of workers and youth, they can appear as a political outlet for their daily struggles. All the more so, inasmuch as the bourgeois political formations are revealing a crisis and a division that are unprecedented since 1958.
But the Union of the Left's response to this crisis is ridiculous. The same people who failed their responsibilities in 1968, when they denounced the revolutionary crisis as a plot hatched by the bourgeoisie, are today proposing nothing but a rearrangement of the system, leaving the bourgeoisie's hands free to carry out economic and military sabotage when it is so inclined. Not only are they not calling on the workers to organize at this April 29, 1974
very moment- the only guarantee of resisting bourgeois repression and assuring the realization of our demands -but they advocate a social truce and demobilization in the interests of national unity.
The tasks of the revolutionists are therefore immense. We must not only be a part of all the struggles that are challenging capitalist society, but we must put forward political answers to an ever growing workers vanguard, which is breaking in practice with reformist policies. We must also begin to prepare the groud for the independent organization and self-defense of the workers against the desperate re sistance that the bourgeoisie will put up in the event of a victory of the Union of the Left. Finally, we must give an internationalist dimension to these anticapitalist struggles, by drawing the lessons of the Chilean experience as well as counterposing the formation of the Socialist United States of Europe to the Europe of the trusts and the monopolies, whose continued existence the Common Program of the left in no way challenges.
Because they defend such ideas and strive to incorporate them into their action, the revolutionary Marxists have continually faced repression at the hands of the bourgeoisie, which resorts to such means as imprisonment and the dissolution of organizations. The Ligue Communiste was the victim of such repression, and we assure its former members of our support in the struggle for the repeal of the nefarious decree of June 28, 1973, that outlawed them because they had fought the racist intrigues of fascist organizations tolerated by the regime. Moreover, even within the workers movement, the revolutionary Marxists have run up against repression by the bureaucracy, which has continually sought to exclude them from the labor movement, although with increasing difficulty.
To meet these tasks, to carry on the struggle undertaken by the Bolshevik party in Russia and continued by Trotsky and the Fourth International, to take an active part in the struggle of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants today in Europe and throughout the world, the undersigned have decided to form an organization. In the tradition of proletarian internationalism, this organization will strive to link the struggle of the French workers with the world struggle against capitalism. This organization will break with the Stalinist caricature of democratic centralism by recognizing the right of tendencies while maintaining the centralization that is necessary to prepare the way for the destruction of the bourgeois state by the workers themselves. And it will strive to encourage everywhere the independent organization of the working class, to prepare in the struggles of today the socialist self-management of tomorrow, democratically centralized by a state based on workers councils.
That is why the undersigned revolutionary militants, having participated in the main struggles of the working class since 1968, call for the formation of a new organization, for the establishment of its federations and sections everywhere, with the perspective of holding a first congress at an early date. To this end, they are herewith appointing a provisional leadership, and calling on workers and youth to join the new organization in massive numbers.
Long live the Revolutionary Communist Front!
Long live the socialist revolution!
Elsa Petit, teacher; Michel Rousseau, post office employee; J. P. Rataj, nurse;
André Fichaut, electrician; Michel Ré- canati, student; Pierre Frank; Michel Lequenne, proofreader; Michel Field, high-school student; Marcel-Francis Kahn, doctor; Jean-Mare Poiron, teacher; R. Adraste, accountant; Alain Krivine, journalist; Jean-Marie Vincent, economist; S. Roux, nurse; Jules Fourrier, construction worker and former Communist deputy in the Popular Front; Pierre Rousset, journalist; Emilia Scialom, teacher; Wilfrid Pasquet, longshoreman; G. Tomassin, civil servant; Jacques Houdet, tool-and-die maker; J. L. Dion, chemical worker; G. Rey, steelworker; J. P. Billard, bank employee; D. Vaillant, laboratory technician; Sophie Petersen, office worker; Paul Adam, student; Marcel Delpell, skilled trades instructor; Gerard Pessy, post office employee; Suzette Robichon, office worker; Colette Bliesenick, teacher; J.P. Pujnik, worker.