[The following article was published in the April 20 issue of La Brèche, the Swiss Trotskyist fortnightly. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
One of the best-known outstanding features of the French bourgeoisie is that, after it had partially overcome its backwardness (at least temporarily) under de Gaulle's Bonapartist regime, which had encouraged an enormous concentration of capital, it found when he left the scene in 1969, that it had a Bonapartist regime with no Bonaparte but no real political structures to replace it (for example, a presidential regime balanced by a parliament). To surmount the resulting political crisis, de Gaulle's successor, Pompidou, strove to use the possibilities offered by the constitution of the Fifth Republic to centralize the uncontrolled state powers even more than de Gaulle had.
For about eighteen months it, had been rumored that Pompidou was stricken with an incurable disease. Attempts by sources close to the president to suppress these rumors had failed, and for the last two or three months there was no longer any doubt. Pompidou limited his appearances to the minimum, canceled his trips within France and abroad, shunned photographers (for his appearance was eloquent proof of his condition), and issued repeated announcements that he was stricken with influenza. Finally, when it was common knowledge that he was suffering from cancer, he issued a medical report announcing that he had hemorrhoids. The clearest indications as to his state of health issued from UDR [Union for the Defense of the Republic, the leading Gaullist party] circles themselves and from other groups in the government majority, where everyone was preoccupied with the issue of who would succeed him.
Another, fairly clear, indication was also provided by the recent ministerial shuffle, the second Messmer cabinet being replaced by the third. This change was intended to install a smaller team, easier for the president to control, and to put a specialist in electoral skulduggery in charge of the Ministry of the Interior, the whole object being to increase as much as possible the present majority's chances in a presidential election.
The UDR and other circles of the government are aware that the whole political situation in France can be suddenly transformed in the wake of Pompidou's death. What we are seeing is a division, a fragmenting of the right, in the face of the Union of the Left, which despite serious internal wrangling will not be broken up this year or next year or probably even in 1976, the year when Pompidou would normally have ended his mandate. The divisions within the right are extensive. The UDR is continuing to decline. It has been abandoned by people who consider themselves Gaullists and not supporters of Pompidou. One of them, Fouchet, formerly one of de Gaulle's ministers, has announced his intention of running against any candidate of the present majority. The minister of finances, Giscard d'Estaing, the leader of the Independent Republicans, has made no secret of the fact that he would run against any candidate of the UDR. And the only candidate with any weight in the latter's camp is Jacques Chaban-Delmas, whom the UDR rebuffed as prime minister last year. Even if these two crooks make way for a third, Pierre Messmer or Edgar Faure, things won't be changed very much. The divisions, the distrust, the bitterness, are such that it will be hard for any one of the candidates to round up all the votes on the second round, even by brandishing the Communist scarecrow. Many circles of the bourgeoisie are resolved to do away with the UDR, and some have not lost hope of being able to detach François Mitterrand, if elected president, from his alliance with the Communist party. We should add that in this situation, probably also partly on account of his illness, Pompidou had piled up some errors and failures, as well as some accidents like the Canard Enchaîné affair 1 that discredited Marcellin and the police.
Mitterrand, in contrast, has a good chance of getting elected, perhaps even on the first round, as the candidate of the Union of the Left. (The CP leadership has no intention of running their own candidate in the first round this time.) The top leadership of the Union of the Left-both the CP and the SP leaders -feigned indifference, on the pretext that they were respecting Pompidou's private life, and they spread the word that they were not preparing for an early election. They could act that way, knowing that electorally they had the wind in their sails and that last-minute maneuvers would have little effect. In fact, their worries are elsewhere. Since last November, they have shown less interest in taking office than they had two months earlier. For in the meantime the "oil crisis" has developed with all its consequences. Inflation and the threat of unemployment are wearing out those who are in power. In 1976, things could be going better ...
The Real Problems
The problems that were in the forefront during the legislative elections of March 1973 still remain. The National Assembly was to discuss this April a draft law on contraception and abortion that had gotten bottled up last year, owing to divisions among the majority on it; then there was a "Fontanet plan" dealing with secondary education, which has already led to high-school student demonstrations like those against the Debré law last year. Other problems, such as pollution and highway safety, have also given rise to discontent and demonstrations. Among the middle classes, the small shopkeepers and peasants whom the government has been wooing are also dissatisfied. Hardly a day passes when there isn't some demonstration on this or that issue. We should also mention the uneasiness in the police, the legal system, and the army.
The grimmest outlook lies without doubt on the economic front. Inflation is a serious problem. For the time being, there is no threat of massive unemployment, but there are pockets of unemployed in some cities and in particular industries and firms. Coming after the shock created by the "oil crisis," this is enough to create some worry, and no one in government or management circles is hazarding any guesses about next fall's employment picture.
The government was talking of steps it planned to take to stop the rise of prices, or rather, to ensure that price increases not go beyond those of neighboring countries. In reality, it is operating by means of expedients.
Its efforts to purchase cheaper oil supplies were unsuccessful. To maintain and if possible to increase exports, which presently account for an important share of the French economy, the government has been trying all sorts of maneuvers to find markets, especially for its arms production, with what appear to be only mediocre results. It floated the franc in what amounts to a devaluation, which will become clear when official figures are released later this year. It is going to sell off the passenger liner France to save the several tens of millions of francs that ship costs each year, but it continues to pour immense sums into the Concorde supersonic transport plane that no one wants to buy. It tried to speed up the collection of direct taxes. It increased the taxes on fuel and transportation, and so on.
As for wages, it defined its policy as follows: to hold the line on this year's standard of living, but not increase it. In practice wages are already lagging behind the rise in prices (even the official index, as rigged as it is, cites a 3 percent increase in January and February) and the gap threatens to grow.
No one is satisfied with this policy, not even the bosses. The National Center of French Management (CNPF) has just issued a rather curt statement emphasizing the uncertainty ahead. Playing the role of a Cassandra since he left office, former Premier Michel Debré is devoting himself to harsh criticisms of the government's financial and economic policies, saying that inflation has reached a level where it endangers the regime. But he proposes an "incomes policy" that the government would not dare introduce.
Militancy Is Not Declining
The workers are putting up considerable resistance to the attacks on their standard of living and jobs. The list of strikes every day is very long. The bank employees strike is one of the most remarkable. Beginning some six weeks ago at the Crédit Lyonnais, a nationalized bank (deposit banks were nationalized at the end of the war), it now embraces several hundred thousand strikers throughout the country. It is a very militant strike, the vast majority of banking personnel today being young people. Almost every day there are demonstrations of tens of thousands of strikers in the center of Paris.
Besides this undeniable militancy, there is also a growing politicization in these mass movements. That is undoubtedly one of the products of the Lip movement. The television recently showed workers, in a printing plant in the Paris area that had been closed by court order, who decided to use the machines to perform jobs that would let them pay themselves. When the interviewer asked them if they had been inspired by Lip, they replied: "It made us think." The Lip movement began to make workers understand that it is possible to go further than the strikes they used to have, and that they must look for possible demands and methods of struggle that go further.
Another expression of a heightened political consciousness is the increased number of strike committees that are formed, elected directly by all the strikers. The strike committees are not counterposed to the unions but neither are they subject to the close control of the trade-union apparatus.
What are the traditional organizations of the working class doing in this situation? The CP and the SP declare their solidarity with the workers in struggle-it's the least they can do - but they are mainly preoccupied with putting the finishing touches to the Common Program they had drawn up before the "oil crisis" came along, which was based on the expectation of an economic "growth" that has now become problematic. In their view, the mass movements and workers struggles should be left to the unions, as their "privileged domain." That in itself testifies to their desire not to try to unify struggles around political perspectives.
In the trade-union movement, what we see is a variant of the fact that the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labor] does not have the same relationship to the SP that the CGT [General Confederation of Labor] has to the CP. In many struggles the CFDT seems to be taking a position to the left of the CGT. The rightward course of the CGT has been expressed most typically in the negotiations that the CGT's professionals and engineers unions are conducting with the CGC (General Confederation of Professionals), whose leader Malterre championed a "French Algeria" and led a bitter, prolonged struggle in his union to maintain and even increase salary differentials. The CGT leadership supports this policy of a wide-open salary scale on the pretext that the professionals would only be alienated if the wage hierarchy were abolished; the CGT is reluctant to defend demands for equal across-the-board wage increases, in contrast to the CFDT, where there is strong pressure from elements favoring wageleveling, including the professionals and technicians it recruits.
Joint action between the CGT and the CFDT is continuing, but at the same time differences have appeared between them. The CGT leadership has taken the initiative in expressing them publicly, and with a certain vehemence. The CFDT often seems to encourage strikes, while the CGT tends to restrain them and even cut them off. Without examining in detail the trends that are occurring, one readily notes that:
1. The CGT shows its hostility toward every movement over which it cannot maintain tight control. On the other hand, it is not afraid to act, and act decisively, when it has almost complete control, as is the case in the Rateau strike in the Paris suburbs, where it wants to make an example-its own Lip, one might say.
2. At the present time the CGT does not encourage the mass picketing or industrywide shutdowns that it has organized more than once in the past. Thus, in the mines in eastern France, it strangled a strike by coal washers that management had answered with a lockout (hypocritically called "technical unemployment"). In doing so, the CGT showed its fear of generalizing the strike to the whole mining industry, where as yet there is no threat of unemployment.
3. The CGT is very hostile to movements where strike committees or other bodies are formed. The differences involved here are not between a revolutionary policy and a reformist policy. The CGT's point of view was formulated very well by one of its secretaries, Bertelot, in a recent interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. Here are some excerpts:
"We have entered a period of rising social struggles. In such a period, the attitude of the CFDT appears extremely dangerous to us. ... What was tolerable several months ago... is no longer, today. ... Our CFDT comrades prefer to support minority movements in which elements from outside the unions and even outside the factory intervene sometimes...• To take responsibility for the disorderly agitation of spontanéist elements, to encourage their initiatives without trying to find out if they have any chance of succeeding, then to say to the CGT, If you had supported us, we would have won: That's not serious! ... If they are conducted vigorously, these ventures can bring a certain fame to the union that supports them, especially in the present climate of general discontent. But it doesn't last...."
It is obvious that the increasingly difficult conditions for struggles in the present period, given the resistance of the bosses and the government, are only a pretext for the CGT leaders. They reproach the CFDT leaders for not having sufficient control of their ranks, of following movements that explode spontaneously or under the influence of vanguard currents. You are recruiting at present, they tell them, but... But it is not responsible (a word that often comes to the lips of the CGT leaders); you are the playthings of the ultraleftists. It is especially true that the CFDT leaders are devoid of any political perspective. As for the CP and the CGT leaders, in no way did they want to be thrust into government by a mass movement of the May '68 type. That is obviously quite different from coming into office on the basis of an electoral victory. The first possibility would be particularly advantageous for the revolutionary vanguard.
The Coming Social Crisis
Whatever the case, here we are in an electoral period that will last up to May 15 or thereabouts. It is certain that the leaders of the unions and the workers parties are going to act as a restraining factor in struggles and demonstrations; it's the same old false argument that the voters must not be frightened. If Mitterand is elected, the situation will take a new turn with repercussions not only for France but for the whole of Western Europe. If the right wins, the mass movement will be no more paralyzed than it was after the legislative elections last year.
In any event, the militancy and politicization of the working masses of France (in the face of which more active fascist and reactionary currents are also beginning to mobilize) are leading more or less rapidly and inexorably toward an enormous social crisis. The vanguard militants, especially the revolutionary Marxists, will have to use the presidential campaign to prepare the masses and themselves for this crisis.
Divisions in Bourgeois Camp
Because the constitution of the Fifth Republic treats the president as a sort of Bonaparte placed above the parties, prospective candidates go through all kinds of contortions trying not to appear to be chosen by a political formation. With the sudden death of Pompidou, none of them had time to perfect his scenario, a situation giving rise to all kinds of incidents. These were all the more amusing the greater the disarray among the politicians of all the bourgeois formations, as they faced the serious possibility that Mitterrand, the candidate of the Union of the Left, might be elected.
It began with a race to see who could declare first-as soon as the corpse was buried. Chaban-Delmas, a former rugby player, won that one, followed closely by Edgar Faure. Giscard d'Estaing, beaten in the first heat, waited two days, invoking respect for conventional decencies. Were there really going to be three candidates for the majority? One clan, whose fortunes had been closely linked to Pompidou's, went after Chaban-Delmas's hide; they pushed Prime Minister Messmer into putting forward his own candidacy and asking the other three to withdraw. Edgar Faure, looking for a way out, took advantage of this to withdraw and save face. But Chaban-Delmas gave Messmer a negative response in an interview whose tone can be judged by the fact that it lasted for only three to four minutes. Messmer had to retreat, his standing even lower than before.
Thus there will be two bourgeois candidates, Chaban-Delmas and Giscard d'Estaing, who on the first round will share the votes of all those opposed to the left and far left, with the exception, however, of a small proportion who will opt for various candidates like National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, or right-wing Gaullist Jean Royer, both of whom have second-rate personal or political followings.
The Réformateurs [Reformers] will divide between the two principal candidates (Jean Lecanuet is already committed to support Giscard), who have committed themselves to standing down on the second round in favor of whichever of the two comes in ahead on the first round.
How will the electorate they are fighting over divide up? The backward part of the masses, the chauvinists and racists, who traditionally voted UDR, will go for Chaban-Delmas. Giscard will have the support of older bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layers. It is difficult to trace the line of cleavage that will take place among what is called the "new middle layers," who will be sought after not only by these two candidates but also by Mitterrand. Last year Giscard would have been the choice, benefiting from his title as minister of finance and the economy in a period of favorable economic conjuncture. That post could easily hurt him today, with the dismal economic outlook. But one can never be sure of anything; the struggle between the two will be very close, and in view of their need to unite on the second round, they will have to handle each other with kid gloves.
Whatever the results on both the first and second rounds, after the elections there will be a very harsh settling of accounts among the political personnel of the Fifth Republic. Even the election of Chaban-Delmas would not serve to strengthen the UDR, and it will disintegrate within a relatively short period of time. The end of this formation is becoming a necessity for the French bourgeoisie. The UDR was the "10th of September Society" made to measure for de Gaulle. It was not based on a social category, or on any political principles, or on any combination of the two: It was simply the organization responsible for supporting the president of the Republic in the country and in parliament. Under de Gaulle's reign, it was even proud of being his "shapeless old shoe."
With Pompidou, this situation was already becoming more difficult. The UDR was controlled by several "barons" who could hold their own against him. But in the end no one really challenged him. Now that is over. But by that very fact, the UDR not only becomes useless; it is actually a nuisance. If need be, the constitution of the Fifth Republic could accomodate a presidential-style regime in place of the Bonapartist one, but there would have to be an effective and safe system of rotation within a new regime of that kind. With the UDR, this doesn't exist. The old Gaullist formula (it's us or the Communists; it's us or chaos) had throttled all the old political structures of the bourgeoisie. With the UDR around, the inevitable alternative solution is what we now see: a polarization of the workers around a "Union of the Left" that contains the CP.
French capitalism greatly fears a government that includes the CP except during periods of extreme danger, like a revolutionary period when it would constitute the last hope for saving the capitalist system. Unlike the bourgeoisie in Great Britain or West Germany, French capitalists do not have a Social Democratic party that can provide a useful alternative against a more or less negligible CP. The problem is all the more serious today in France in that not only is the CP a major party in the working class, but in recent years it has been seriously challenged on its left by a revolutionary vanguard. Is French capitalism capable of getting rid of the UDR and creating an adequate new political structure in its place? We are inclined to reply in the negative. In any case, for the time being, the presidential election is speeding the crisis and disintegration of the UDR.
The Mitterrand Candidacy
For some months it was expected that Mitterrand would be the single candidate of the left even on the first round. The CP leadership had made statements along these lines, while not spelling out the reasons. What could those reasons be?
Many purposes could enter into it: to avoid putting up a candidate who would get a lower vote than Mitterrand on the first round; to wrap Mitterrand in the "Common Program" from the beginning; perhaps even to weaken his candidacy indirectly. But this attitude of the CP has considerably helped Mitterrand, in the sense that he can readily use it to suggest that he has freed himself from the control of the parties supporting him and also from the content of the Common Program. He has carried out his operation with considerable skill, knowing that the leadership of the CP does not want to take the initiative for a split, and that it cannot, since it has no policy other than the Union of the Left. Mitterrand will not campaign on the Common Program; a program, he says, is something for a government, while the president of the Republic can only formulate the "themes" that will be his guidelines.
Mitterrand is supported not only by the Union of the Left, but also by those who said they were critics of the Union of the Left and its Common Program: the self-proclaimed champions of a "self-management socialism," the leaderships of the PSU and the CFDT. We will have occasion later, in dealing with the far-left candidates, to indicate the reasons why Michel Rocard and Edmond Maire rushed to grant Mitterrand their support without expressing the least criticism or reservation. Their actions showed clearly that all their previous statements criticizing the Union of the Left and the Common Program, all their words about how workers struggles should not be subordinated to elections - all of it disappeared as soon as Mitterrand's election to the presidency of the Republic became plausible, with the death of Pompidou.
Mitterrand has also received support from circles that are altogether tiny and insignificant to him, but whose action should be called to the attention of those who follow the organizations that claim to be part of the revolutionary far left. These are the pseudo-Trotskyists of the OCI/ AJS, the Lambertists.2 Not long ago they were denouncing the bid by Mitterrand, a bourgeois politician, to take over the Socialist party; they called for the defense of that party against his operation. Only a few months ago, they were denouncing the Union of the Left above all because of the presence of Left Radicals in it. However, an element of equivocation began to characterize their attitude during the 1973 election campaign. After long discussions with the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvrière on the possibility of dividing up electoral districts and counterposing the revolutionary road to the electoral and parliamentary road advocated by the Union of the Left, they ended up running in some twenty districts, against the candidates of the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvrière. Today, the double-talk is gone: the OCI/AJS are calling for a vote for Mitterrand beginning with the first round. Yes, there are the Left Radicals, they say, but there are other bourgeois running against them. "In the present situation," they add, "Mitterrand's election is a stage on the road of the necessary struggle against capitalism and the bourgeois state." The Trotskyist vocabulary this group still continues to dip into can no longer hide its role as a pressure group around the Union of the Left.
During the last presidential election, in 1969, the vast majority of the bourgeois camp rallied around Pompidou's candidacy, the CP ran Jacques Duclos on its program, and the SP was forced by Gaston Defferre to run him in a hopeless campaign. It was a year after May '68, and the Ligue Communiste, which had just been founded, saw an opportunity to appear in the political arena, presenting the revolutionary Marxist program in the light of the lessons of May '68.
This time, the political situation is different. There is, to be sure, a powerful mass current in support of the Union of the Left, and the Mitterrand candidacy has real chances of achieving an electoral victory. But there is also in France- and this has been manifested for two or three years — a far left that is not politically insignificant and that can play a very important political role in the present revolutionary upsurge. Through its activity, this revolutionary far left can prevent the process involving the Union of the Left from ending in an abortion as occurred with its homologue in Chile.
Was it possible to provide authentic expression for this far left in the presidential election? Was it possible to give its views an effective hearing?
The reply to these questions appeared very quickly within the revolutionary organizations: If Charles Piaget, the main leader of the Lip movement, were to run on a precise program, he would symbolize for broad layers of workers, intellectuals, students, and peasants, too, the desire for anticapitalist and extraparliamentary struggle, and a distrust of the Union of the Left and its electoralist methods. The Piaget candidacy would mobilize men and women far beyond the organized formations of the far left, and would have powerful repercussions, not least among many in the electorate who would vote for the Union of the Left candidate.
The far-left formations and newspapers quickly reached agreement on the proposed candidacy, with the exception of Lutte Ouvrière, which decided straight off to run a member of its own leadership, Comrade Arlette Laguiller, who at that moment was part of the leadership of the bank employees' strike. (For the Lutte Ouvrière comrades, the Krivine candidacy of 1969 was just an advertising campaign, and without troubling themselves with any profound political thinking, they intend to carry out a similar operation in their own interests.) But Piaget is a member of the PSU and the CFDT. He was inclined to respond favorably to the proposal made to him (and which had also been made previously to the PSU), but he did not wish to be a candidate against the opinion of his party.
No sooner had the first approaches been made than Michel Rocard and Edmond Maire issued statements categorically rejecting such a venture. They, too, had quickly understood the significance the Piaget candidacy could not fail to acquire, the impact that it would have during the election campaign and for a long time after. Hence the veto by Rocard (who is quite willing to accept a job in a ministry of the Union of the Left), and the veto by Maire, which has much more impact. Both, it must be emphasized, issued their vetoes without even asking the opinion of the bureaus of their organizations.
At the PSU, the National Political Directorate (its central committee), convening after the event, adopted by 48 votes to 35 Rocard's position in favor of the proposal to run a PSU candidate. During the Easter weekend the national council will meet to make a final decision. The CFDT has called a special meeting of its national council, which will be convening only after Maire has made his public statement supporting the Mitterrand candidacy. Some will probably be opposed, but it is unlikely that Maire's position will be overturned.
In the event that all the efforts of the far left should not succeed in getting Charles Piaget to run, Rouge had asked Lutte Ouvrière to run, as a common candidate on an agreed program, a worker militant who would not belong to the leadership of an organization. This proposal, too, was rejected by Lutte Ouvrière which intends to keep its candidate in the running, whatever happens. In these conditions, Rouge will present Alain Krivine as its candidate. The presence of two revolutionary candidates in the campaign, while unfortunate, will only express the differences that lie behind the existence of the two formations, and in one form or another these differences will be expressed in the campaigns conducted by the candidates.
The election campaign is about to open. In a forthcoming article, we will look at the issues that will be posed by all the candidates during the campaign.
April 11, 1974
Notes
1. One night last November, the publisher of the popular antigovernment satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné surprised plainclothes police in the act of installing hidden electronic listening devices in the new offices of the newspaper, then under construction. In the resulting investigation, which is still under way, it was suggested that the cops were acting on direct orders of Raymond Marcellin, who was then minister of the interior. — IP
2. Organisation Communiste Internationaliste/ Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme - Internationalist Communist Organization/Alliance of Youth for Socialism. - IP