Paris
The French presidential election provided evidence of the extremely favorable revolutionary perspectives facing France and, consequently, the whole of Western Europe. This has not been sufficiently understood everywhere. We will dwell in the following pages on the polarization of the country, the tremendous upsurge of the masses, the collapse of Gaullism, and the impressive electoral results scored by the far left as well as the question of the latter's vote in the second round of balloting.
Unlike so many others, this was not an election to replace one president by another as, for example, in the United States when a Democrat succeeds a Republican, or vice versa, without any effect on the country's political system. The Gaullists did not choose a replacement for Pompidou, who had himself taken de Gaulle's place; instead, the governing Gaullists were kicked out, after having ruled France since the army's coup in Algeria in 1958.
For some time already it had become a necessity for the bourgeoisie to put an end to the Gaullist regime; but, lacking an alternative, the bourgeoisie was not sure this could be done. Since May 1968 Gaullism had simply been surviving. Pompidou had continued along the course set by de Gaulle. The Gaullist organization, the UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la République - Union of Democrats for the Republic], remained in command, but this had become dangerous, encouraging the polarization of the masses toward the workers' parties.
The bourgeoisie was still hesitating at the outset of the election campaign between the Gaullist Chaban-Delmas and Giscard d'Estaing. Everyone knew that although Giscard had collaborated for years with the UDR in the government, he was out to eliminate it at the first opportunity. These hesitations vanished in less than a week, so that the first round of the elections finished the Gaullist candidate 776
and finished Gaullism. The regime founded on May 13, 1958, died after a death agony that began in May 1968 but that was considerably prolonged because of the cowardice and betrayal of the traditional leaderships of the workers' movement, as well as the uncertainties and hesitations of the bourgeois politicians.
Upsurge of the Masses
The overall figures indicate that Giscard was elected by a very small majority, just as Kennedy was over Nixon. In terms of living forces, of class forces, the result has quite a different meaning — a polarization and politicization of the country to a very high degree. The politicization was expressed by, among other things, a lower rate of abstention than ever (12.06%). Of the close to 26 million voters in metropolitan France, there were only 342,000 votes separating the two candidates. Grouped around Giscard were all the bourgeois forces, from the center-left Radicals led by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, to the extreme rightists of the Ordre Nouveau, the CFT, former members of the OAS, persons who served in the Pétain regime, 1 the old right wing (Pinay, Bidault, etc.), and the Center Right (Lecanuet). The surge forward of the masses is underscored by, among other things, the following statistics:
On the first round Mitterrand got 700,- 000 more votes than all the Union of the Left candidates in the March 1973 legislative elections; on the second round, he picked up not only all the votes of the left and far left from the first round, but almost a million additional votes as well. Nor should we forget that young people under 21 years of age did not have the right to vote.2 Close to 75% of the industrial workers voted for Mitterrand, a higher percentage of support than even the British Labour party gets. Iwo-thirds of those under 35 years of age voted for Mitterrand. In bourgeois neighborhoods like the sixteenth arrondissement in Paris and like Neuilly, Giscard got about 70% of the votes, which is the same figure that Mitterrand got in the workers' districts (for example: Bobigny, 75%; Bagnolet, 72%; Saint-Denis, 69%). Mitterrand's campaign called forth massive meetings in all the major cities. Giscard's strongholds are the old reactionary departments of the West and East of France, and even there he suffered a setback. The main trade-union federations, the CGT, the CFDT, and the important Fédération de l'Education Nationale, participated in the campaign. Force Ouvrière refused to take a position, but its leaders admitted that 80% of its members were voting for Mitterrand. With the exception of a handful of spontanéists and Mao-Stalinists, the far left voted for Mitterrand on the second round. (We will come back to this later.) In last year's elections, around 2% of the vote went to the Left Radicals, thanks to the Socialists who did not run candidates against them. The appeals to Chaban's constituents between the first and second rounds had little
3. CGT [Confederation Generale du Travail- General Confederation of Labor, led by the Stalinists); CFDT [Confedera-
Francaise et Democratique du Tration vail - French Democratic Confederation of Labor, of Social-Democratic inclination]; FEN [National Federation of Education, the main teachers' union); Force Ouvriere [Workers Power, a relatively right-wing union] - IP
success: 80% of them voted for Giscard; 10% abstained; and 10%, or 1.5% of the total, cast their vote for Mitterrand.
Almost all the bourgeois commentators recognized that, sociologically, the Mitterrand vote was a class vote, to be viewed in the context of the movements that have developed in recent years, and no bourgeois politician or journalist in France jumped for joy when the result of the May 19 vote was announced.4 The 'Heritage' of Gaullism
The Gaullist candidate obtained only 14.55% of the votes. The Gaullist parliamentary group still has the most seats in the National Assembly. But it would be erroneous to think that Gaullism still has a future. It is in an advanced state of decay, and this is going to get worse. The maneuvers that undermined Chaban's candidacy began in the very midst of this group, with the formation of the "Group of 43" at the outset of the campaign. The leading spirit in this group, Chirac, has become Giscard's prime minister, the better to demolish the UDR.
But if today the French bourgeoisie has a president who represents the conservative right wing from the political, technocratic, and economic standpoints, it nonetheless has no political structures worthy of the name. The Independent Republicans, the various groups of the political "Center," are all at most clubs that can get together to form a more or less united parliamentary group, but this does not constitute a genuine political party. To be sure, the capitalist system in certain instances can function under such conditions for a timethat was the case in France under the Third Republic when the Radical party itself was mainly a collection of electoral committees. But we are no longer living under the Third Republic, and the Fourth Republic died largely as a result of the political fragmentation that characterized it. French capitalism, with a higher degree of concentration than ever, threatened by enormous economic difficulties and serious political crises, needs adequate political tools. Giscard can find ministers (there are always candidates for the various portfolios); he will be able to formulate policy on a day-by-day basis for some time, but as events unfold remorselessly he will need a political line and a political instrument to put it into effect.
At the same time, he will have to reorganize the state apparatus, which is still riddled with Gaullists and is in need of tuning up. There are behind-the-scenes struggles and some that are not so secret. In this connection, it has been mentioned that among the statistics on the distribution of the May 19 votes, "almost 50% of the military [officers and NCOs] voted for the left" (Le Figaro, May 27), and that in several housing projects inhabited by police ("Flievilles"
[Cop-towns] is the term the police themselves use to describe them) more than 40% voted for Mitterrand. We should be careful about taking these figures for good coin, but they indicate some actual tendencies in the state's coercive apparatus that we have called attention to in recent years.
In fact, what we are seeing in terms of political forces and the state apparatus is the end result of sixteen years of Gaullism. The latter performed many services for capital, but at the cost of some loss to old bourgeois political formations and the stability of the state apparatus. Since May 1968 the bourgeoisie has been generally paralyzed, with the result that now the chickens will come home to roost. The problems facing the new government include not only the growing inflation, the unemployment that has already appeared, and the increased difficulties encountered in foreign trade. They also include problems stemming from the desire of the masses for a "change in life style"- for an end to the hellish pace of work in the factories, for adequate transportation facilities, decent housing, and social services, for an end to pollution and so many other things that make life more and more unendurable. There are the problems arising from the hostility of young people to the educational system and the barracks life they are forced to endure. The problems arising from the aspiration of women to end their age-old oppression. There is also the revolt against regimentation, stifling centralization, and the conformist, boring mass media.
Score of the Far Left
The second-round figures have somewhat overshadowed the results obtained by the far left on the first round, as well as their political significance. Almost 700,000 votes went to Alain Krivine and Arlette Laguiller. The vote for René Dumont, the ecology candidate, was undoubtedly a leftwing vote, but on the other hand it is unlikely that many far-left votes went to him.
One can say with assurance that the far left is not limited to these figures. Remember that youth under 21 do not as yet have the right to vote, and that the far left is especially strong in this category, as several polls have indicated. Moreover, a great many voters who gravitate in the periphery of the far-left organizations, who share their views on the reformist politics of the traditional organizations, and who are looking for a revolutionary political line, voted for Mitterrand beginning with the first round, not out of confidence in the Union of the Left, but to "make their votes count," to assure Mitterrand's victory if possible on the first round and thereby loosen up the situationbecause everyone knew that the struggle would be very close, and to them, waiting for the second round might mean losing an opportunity. An a posteriori debate on this is useless, but on the eve of the first round it was not at all meaningless. In any event, it can be said without risk of error that the far left has an electoral score of close to a million votes, against about 12 million votes for the left.
In other words, in a period of revolutionary upsurge of the working masses, while the vast majority is still under the leadership of the reformists, whether Social Democrats or Stalinists, there is already an important sector -generally younger and more militant-of around 7% that constitutes a vanguard, one whose role can only increase.5 This is all the more true in that there is no clean division between this far left and the mass of workers who voted for the Union of the Left. The latter certainly generated a lot of enthusiasm, but this enthusiasm was not uncritical; there was no irrational outpouring of enthusiasm such as was seen around the Popular Front in 1936 when the far left was numerically insignificant and no one was listening to it.
Thus, in the wake of May '68, the experience of the masses is expressed not only by their powerful radicalization, but also by the existence of a vanguard of already substantial num-
5. The far left does not at all form a politically homogeneous body, nor is it identical with the existing organizations. For example, included in the far left are many sympathizers of the PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifie- United Socialist party] and those who belong to or gravitate around the OCI [Organisation Commu-
Internationaliste- Internationalist niste Communist Organization, the "Lambertists") the two organizations that voted for Mitterrand from the first round. But the PSU is no longer anything but an appendage of the Socialist party, and the OCI once again demonstrated that in spite of the Trotskyist vocabulary it uses, it is above all a pressure group on the traditional organizations in the workers' movement; and, what's more, a very weak and clumsy pressure group.
The heterogeneity of the new vanguard also explains the difference between the results obtained by Alain Krivine (about 100,000 votes) and Arlette Laguiller (600,000). Their campaigns were very different in many respects. Alain Krivine campaigned in the name of an organization, the FCR [Front Communiste Revolutionnaire- Revolutionary Communist Front], and his personality was kept as much in the background as is possible in an election campaign of this kind. Participating in his TV and radio broadcasts were an Antilles comrade, a soldier, some women, some workers, and a former Communist party deputy of Popular Front days who was deported during the war. 778
bers- a vanguard that is certainly not politically homogeneous, but which nonetheless constitutes a factor to be weighed in the French political seene, and even more so in the daily arena of the class struggle than in the episodic electoral arena. But is it true, as some people think, that this far left made a serious error, and fell into a trap, by voting for Mitterrand on the second round?
The Meaning of the Union of the Left
Leaving aside the anarchists, who advocate abstention at all times, it is notable that the overwhelming majority of the far left, including groups that in the past had been abstentionist, called for voting for Mitterrand on the second round. The exceptions were a few spontanéists and a handful of Mao-Stalinists who supported their arguments by dipping into the documents of the Stalinist "Third Period" in order to combat not only the "revisionists" of the Kremlin but also
The Laguiller campaign was personalized to the extreme. The name of the newspaper Lutte Ouriere did not even appear on the 30 million copies of her programmatic statement that were distributed by the state [in accordance with French election law]. Laguiller appeared alone in the mass media. Thousands of posters were pasted up bearing only the reference "Vote for Arlette."
Both campaigns included denunciations of the capitalist system, but Laguiller's was limited to that, while Krivine's devoted a major aspect of his campaign to indicating the revolutionary ways and means of achieving socialism (through committees, militias, etc.). Essentially, Laguiller denounced Mitterrand for his past as a "phony left-wing bourgeois politician" but did not engage in any fundamental criticism of the Union of the Left.
It follows that Krivine's vote was a more politicized and more militant vote than Laguiller's. The meetings organized by Lutte Ouriere did not draw bigger crowds than the FCR's, including the meetings held after the first round when its results were already known. We in no way want to belittle the value of the result obtained by the Laguiller candidacy, but one cannot draw any conclusions from the difference between the two vote totals as to the respective strength of the organizations or their effective influence in the day-to-day class struggle. These remain essentially what they were before the election.
the "Hitlero-Trotskyites." One can hold doubts about taking them as authorities on matters of revolutionary polities.
Some people's criticisms undoubtedly result from a lack of understanding of what desistement on the second round means. In France, where this practice has been followed for nearly a century, it has never meant acceptance, even partially, of the program of the candidate in whose favor you désiste. All the far-left organizations that called for voting for Mitterrand on the second round did so while continuing to fight his campaign, the Union of the Left, and the Common Program. 7 Others have criticized the vote on the second round out of "doctrinaire" considerations: They say it was not a class vote because Mitterrand's campaign was not a campaign for independent political action by the working class, because it did not present a program of class against class, because the Union of the Left is not a "united front" of workers' parties but rather a more or less embryonic "popular front" owing to the presence in it of the Left Radicals, the intentions of the CP and SP leaders, ete. How valid are these criticisms?
To demand of a CP or SP candidate that he advance a class program, before being able to withdraw in his favor, is to say in reality that one will never withdraw, because a candidate of these parties will never present such a program. But those who take that position must also say that Lenin was wrong to advocate voting for the candidates of the Labour party in Great Britain, where there is only one round of voting. So the first argument is invalid.
Now what about the "united front" of workers' parties? It has no particular virtue in itself; it can stimulate workers' militancy, but it can also at other times serve to stifle that militancy. Is the Union of the Left a "popular front"? Let us avoid a somewhat metaphysical debate, for truth is always concrete-including the truth about the politics of the reformist parties. For a very long time the Social Democrats, and for a lesser period, the Stalinists, have had a reformist political line that serves the capitalist system. They have long sought to collaborate with the bourgeoisie, even in the government. That does not mean that every political line of the Social Democracy or Stalinism must be called a "popular front." We had not a popular front but a "Union Sacrée" [Sacred Union] government in 1914 in France and several other countries, the Churchill coalition government in 1940, and governments of "national union" in several European countries in 1945, and today in Portugal. The German government headed by Ebert in November 1918 did not include a single bourgeois minister, but that did not prevent it from assassinating Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The reformists' polities are always reformist, but they assume specific forms that vary according to the political and social context. These forms must be analyzed each time in order to determine the appropriate tactic to combat the reformists politics, if one does not want to make an abstract and ineffectual criticism. Let us look at the differences between the Popular Front of 1936 and the Union of the Left of 1974.
The Popular Front was a policy initiated in Moscow. At that time the Kremlin, in order to defend itself against Hitler's Germany, was looking for capitalist countries similarly threatened by Germany, with a view to establishing an alliance; and to this end, the workers' parties sought to ally themselves with big bourgeois parties in order to establish governments that supported Soviet diplomacy.
In France, an alliance was formed with the Radical party, which was at that time the main party of the bourgeoisie. The openly proclaimed objective of the Popular Front was to defend bourgeois democracy June 17, 1974
against the growing fascist threat. In the 1936 elections, which assured the victory of the Popular Front, the Radical party obtained about a third of the votes of the Popular Front, coming second behind the Socialist party and ahead of the Communist party. The situation today is quite different on all these points. The French CP is still linked to the Kremlin, but the latter, owing to a different world situation, deals directly with bourgeois governments that take their distance from Washington. The Kremlin supported de Gaulle and Pompidou, and in the very midst of the recent election campaign, the Soviet ambassador in Paris publicly took a position (through a diplomatic ploy) in support of Giscard, arousing unconcealed anger from the Communist party. The Left Radicals are only the remnants of the Radical party, which is itself in ruins; they got 2% of the vote last year only because the Socialist party took them as their own candidates in about forty constituencies. As for the program of the Union of the Left, its authors- the SP and CP-present it as a short stage toward a socialist society. We do not believe that statement, but you cannot fight the Union of the Left without showing that it is illusory.
The Popular Front was the form reformist politics took during the rise of fascism. The Union of the Left is in fact a response by the workers' parties to the workers' upsurge that has been developing since May '68. It is an attempt to channel that upsurge by presenting it with a "common program" that would enable the workers to proceed to socialism along the peaceful, parliamentary road. That is the fundamental fact from which the revolutionary Marxists determined their electoral tactic on the second round. Let us note in this connection the mishap of the Lambertists who, last year, were raging against Mitterrand as a bourgeois politician who had taken over a workers' party, and against the Union of the Left on the pretext that it was a "popular front." In the presidential election, they were voting for him as "the first secretary of the Socialist party" and not as the candidate of the Union of the Left! Everyone in France understands that standing down in support of another candidate is not a vote for his program, but who can understand the Lambertists* vote on the first round, as if there were a difference between the SP's program and the Common Program.
The thrust of the masses toward socialism has taken many forms in France, from workers' mobilizations like the Lip struggle, to the mobilizations of the Larzac peasants and others. Electorally, it has been expressed in the Mitterrand vote. To refuse to vote for Mitterrand on the second round, or to abstain, was to refuse to help the masses if possible to go through the experience of the Union of the Left as the best, if not the only, way to rid them of their electoralist, parliamentarist, and reformist illusions - the intervention of the revolutionists helping them to go through this experience. Such a refusal would have been political infantilism, as
Lenin explains in "Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder," in words that everyone should read again. Not to vote for Mitterrand on the second round would have been to replace political action with sermons on socialism. In fact, to advocate abstention would have been to vote for Giscard, which would have meant cutting ourselves off from the workers for many years, without the least hope that the future would bring any justification whatsoever.
Notes
1. CFT [Confederation Francaise du Travail - French Confederation of Labor, a scab "union"; OAS [Organisation de l'Armee Secrete - Secret Army Organization, composed of army officers and French settlers based in French-ruled Algeria, active in the fifties); the Petain regime collaborated with the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944. - IP
2. There are also 3 million "foreign" workers in France-North Africans, Blacks, Portuguese, etc. — who don't have the right to vote, or any other right except that of being superexploited.
4. We have mentioned only metropolitan France, the "hexagon" [the map of France can be inscribed in a hexagon], and not what remains of the former colonial Empire, the TOM-DOM (Overseas Territories and Departments) where fraudulent practices in the elections are traditional. Since for the bourgeoisie the decision between Giscard and Chaban was to be made by means of the first round, several thousand magistrates were sent to these areas, with instructions to supervise the elections. This supervisory operation, continued on the second round, provided equally interesting results: Mitterrand obtained a majority (56.4%) in Guadeloupe, 50.46% in Reunion where [former premier Michel] Debre was elected, 51.23% in so-called French Polynesia, and almost half the vote in Guyana (46.93%), 42.90% in Martinique, and 49.73% in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. Complete or nearly complete fraudulent returns were limited to Djibouti, the Comor Islands, and Wallis and Futuna.
6. The nearest equivalent in British or American terms is to "stand down" or "withdraw" a candidate. - IP
7. To really understand the FCR's election campaign, we advise everyone who can do so to read through all the issues of Le Quotidien Rouge [the daily Rouge] which was published every day for three weeks. We think it was a particularly successful example of a revolutionary daily - militant, full of life, attractive, without sacrificing anything in necessary political firmness.