[The following article appeared in the January 31 issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly news bulletin published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.]
The constituent congress of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist League), French section of the Fourth International, was held in Paris December 19-22, 1974. This congress will go down in the history of the French Trotskyist movement, for it was devoted to analyzing a social and political reality very much different from that which prevailed during the three congresses of the ex-Ligue Communiste (1969, 1971, and 1972), which was dissolved by the government in June 1973 for its antifascist and antiracist activities. The new organization recorded the deep changes in relation to the past, especially as regards its links with workers strug gles and the consequent new problems of intervention that must be resolved.
The Political Context
The three congresses of the ex-Ligue Communiste took place in a political context that could be defined as the post- May '68 situation. Gaullism was then entering into open crisis. The reformist workers parties were offering no consistent political perspective to the working class, which was conscious of the impact this deficiency had had during the 1968 general strike. The revolutionary far left was affirming its presence and seizing opportunities for important central mobilizations. A new generation of vanguard militants was progressively worker emerging in the factories.
Today the French political scene is dominated by the international economic recession. Given the current state of the relationship of forces between the classes, the Giscard d'Estaing regime appears incapable of resolving the open crisis of bourgeois leadership in France, marked by the shaking of Bonapartism. The regime is condemned to administering the crisis as best it can while preparing for the coming social confrontations. The revolutionary and worker militants are now confronted with claims of the big reformist parties (the SP and the CP) that they have a solution to the crisis: the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) and its Common Program of government. Finally, the struggles waged earlier in the fac- 262
tories, the acceleration of inflation, and the appearance of massive unemployment require that the vanguard be more capable than before of offering precise and concrete responses on the way to struggle.
In this political conjuncture, the weakness of the social roots of the far left and the ultraleft and opportunist deviations that run through it to a large extent exert their full weight. The far left is suffering from a general crisis of growth marked by the recomposition of certain organizations (the departure of the Rocard tendency from the centrist Parti Socialiste Unifie (PSU- United Socialist party), for example, by the outbreak of splits (in Lutte Ouvriere [Workers Struggle], an economistic Trotskyist current), the disappearance of a centralized Mao-spontaneist current in favor of a relative strengthening of the Mao-Stalinist sects (Humanite Rouge and Front Rouge), the absence of any definite orientation on the part of some organizations (like Revolution, an ultraleft current that split from the Ligue Communiste in 1970), and the complete marginalization of the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme-Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (Young Socialist Alliance-Internationalist Communist Organization, a rightist sect claiming to be Trotskyist).
A Changing Organization
The Trotskyist movement tied to the Fourth International has proven itself the most capable within the French far left of grasping the new features of the political situation and the class struggle. But this has not prevented the necessity of opening a very broad internal debate. All the more so in that we have reached a very particular stage in our organizational development. The statistics on the organization and the congress (social composition, sex, age, and trade-union responsibilities of members and delegates) illustrate the progress that has been registered not only in comparison with the pre-May '68 period but also in comparison with the past two years.
The most important differences with the three congresses of the ex-Ligue Communiste concern social composition. Some 61% of the militants were wage workers (69% if we include salaried students); 12% were blue-collar workers, 17% white-collar workers, 5% technicians, 3% supervisory personnel, 13% tenured teachers, 8% substitute teachers, 4% unemployed
(and more than 5% miscellaneous). Students accounted for no more than 24% of the membership (which may increase somewhat during the university year; high-schoolers were barely 5%. Last spring a national conference of the Taupe Rouge (Red Mole) groups of worker sympathizers and factory cells of the Front Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist Front, predecessor of the LCR) had assembled 1,300 militants in a provincial city, Lyon. Beyond these nevertheless, the workers imfigures, plantation is very uneven: strong in the hospitals, posts and telegraphs, for example; relatively weaker in the industrial proletariat, the metal and automobile industries, etc.
More important, a growing number of trade-union militants (nearly 55% of the members are in the CGT, the CFDT- the two main workers confederationsor the FEN, the teachers union) have a real experience of struggle and are taking on responsibilities in the trade unions (this is the case in various forms for more than one-third of the Ligue's trade unionists). The debates on the tasks before us have correspondingly changed; they have become very concrete.
Between the third congress of the ex- Ligue Communiste and the founding congress of the LCR our movement has grown 15-20%, despite the much too fre quent departure of militants.
But this considerable progress (let us recall that six years ago we were intervening almost exclusively in the student milieu) should not conceal the weaknesses of our development.
The organization remains very young politically. To be sure, it has "aged" considerably. The average age of the dele gates to the congress was three years higher than the average age of the dele gates to the third congress of the ex-Ligue Communiste. The most numerous age brackets in the organization are 21-25 years old (47% ), 26-30 years (27% ), and 18-20 years (13%). But about 50% of the militants have been in the Trotskyist movement only since 1972. Only 26% have more than five years political activity in our current; 21% joined in 1974. This shows that while the organization has grown numerically in a regular way, it has also lost a significant number of militants; and that is serious.
The sexual composition of the organization is progressing. Nevertheless, it is still very unequal. About 30% of the militants of the LCR are women. More significantly, though, this percentage falls to 23% among the delegates and 16% among the city-level leadership.
In a more general fashion, the worker militants meet important difficulties in taking on central responsibility in the organization, and strengthening of the factory cells has occurred much more slowly than the multiplication of organized sympathizing groups (the Taupe Rouge groups) in the factories.
The problem cannot be presented solely in figures. The French Trotskyist move ment has become a real national political organization (the "smallest of the political parties" as the bourgeois journalists sometimes say). But the LCR is still far from being in position to offer a concrete and credible alternative to the reformist parties. We have never been so deeply involved in important workers struggles (the most recent example being the postal strike); never have the themes we have raised been so hotly discussed in the workers movement (the question of self-organization of the working class, for example); and never has our trade-union implantation been so large. But we are still incapable of practically offering national solutions to the workers struggles or national outlets for the tendency battles waged within the trade unions. The results of five years of antimilitarist activity, fed by the crisis of the French army, have gone beyond anything expected. But the far left has not been able to initiate central mobilizations to support the move ment of the draftees as large as the mobilizations against the Debre law in 1973.
We stand at a very particular stage of our development in which our objective responsibilities have expanded considerably, in which our capacities for intervention in the class struggle are far beyond what they were six or even three years ago, but in which we still cannot offer a national alternative to the policy of the reformist parties in practice.
Congress Debate
The opening of a broad internal de bate was made necessary by the combination of a change in the French political situation and a stage of tension in our organizational development, the combination itself unfolding before the backdrop of a deepening of the class struggle on a European scale.
The organization was divided into four tendencies over the orientation to adopt in regard to the analysis of the political situation the modification of the form and content of our work in the masses, and the organizational measures that should consequently be taken. The theses of Tendency 2 were the ones adopted by the congress.
The congress stressed the structural February 24, 1975
character of the crisis of the regime. Given the current state of things, the regime cannot expect the breakup of the Union de la Gauche and a consequent move of the SP toward a centrist solution, despite the debate now going on between the SP and the CP. In fact, the recomposition of the SP would be placed in question in the event of the breakup of the Union de la Gauche While stressing the bourgeois nature of the Common Program of the Union de la Gauche and the existence of a class-collaborationist orientation on the part of the CP and the SP, the congress rejected characterizing the Union de la Gauche as an embryonic popular front (which was proposed by Tendency 4). The essential contradiction of the Union de la Gauche remains that it is a front of class collaboration but is perceived by the working class as representing the unity of the big workers parties. It thus tends simultaneously to mislead the class struggle and to stimulate it through the hopes that it raises by offering an apparently credible alternative to the crisis of bourgeois leadership. Consequently, it is the reformist project of the CP and the SP that must be directly denounced as such, rather than putting the main emphasis on the organic alliance of the CP and SP with some bourgeois forces (the left radicals) as Tendency 1 proposed.
The congress concretely located the place occupied in the construction of the French section of the Fourth International by the emergence of a broad vanguard - and within it a workers vanguard of a mass character - as described in the European perspectives document adopted by the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International. Tendency 4 denied the central place of this vanguard, rejecting the conclusions of the European document: To reach the masses through concrete mobilizations generated by setting in motion the broad vanguard that represents the generation of militants who, without having broken strategically with the re formists, are concretely escaping the control of the bureaucracies and asserting a capacity for independent initiatives. To win hegemony over this vanguard by orienting it toward the masses and by qualitatively strengthening our implantation in the broad workers vanguard. To apply in this manner a united front tactic based on the desire of the masses for unity and for a program of class struggle To consequently address ourselves within the far left on a priority basis to the centrist political currents that in their own way reflect the process of radicalization going on among the working class; to do this by opening a debate, especially with the PSU. This overall orientation was rejected by Tendency 1, which saw it, among other things, as a temptation to adapt to the exclusive and confused aspirations of the broad workers vanguard, and by Tendency 3, which feared that too sharp a differentiation was being made between the broad vanguard and its workers component, which would lead to a workerist orientation. This debate was central because of the implications it could have for the analysis of the political situation, for the orientation toward mass work, and for the choices of how to construct the organization (on the city and national levels).
Finally, the congress concluded its work by adopting a series of measures that should accelerate the changes now going on in our organization Priority was given to political training and above all to cadre-building, to the taking in charge of the workers intervention by the central leadership and the establishment of publications and cadre schools specifically adapted to the education of worker militants; to the transformation of our press system by preparing to launch a daily newspaper next September or October; to a modification in the functioning of the leadership. It is in fact a whole new system of organization that has to be set up progressively, that has to be based on a qualitative politicization of the internal life of the Ligue and on the transformation of the manner of carrying out mass work.
Essentially, the discussion and debate dealt with the application of the planks of the Transitional Program to the tactics of party-building in a given situation with a particular relationship of forces. In this regard the discussion is of interest to the entire International.
This congress was prepared by the holding of a real democratic debate, which is what made the congress possible. Any current assembling the signatures of thirty or more members on the basis of a political orientation had tendency rights: equal financing provided by the organization; the right to hold local, regional, and national meetings; equal space in the internal bulletin; equal rights in sending speakers around the organization; equal time for presentation of reports at the congress. The discussion time at the congress (apart from the reports) was divided according to the percentage of votes registered at the regional congresses; there was also proportional representation on the new central committee.
The relative political weakness of the organization and some organizational difficulties had negative influences on the debafe. But the development of the debate as a whole represented important progress compared with the three congresses of the ex-Ligue Communiste. A real tradition of democratic centralism has thus taken hold. And this is decisive for the future, for other debates will certainly be necessary.
After this debate, Tendency 2 won 59%
of the delegates to the congress; Tendency 3 had 19%, Tendency 1 had 18.6%, and Tendency 4 had 3%-
The debate at the congress centered only on the situation in France. But the congress was nevertheless an internationalist one. This was reflected in many ways: its request to integrate into the Fourth International; the greetings it sent to political prisoners in Spain, to the peoples of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, to the peoples of Indochina in struggle, to the Ceylonese comrade Rohana Wijeweera, who had just been sentenced to life imprisonment, to the Chilean militants confronted by the dictatorship; the presence of members of many organizations of the Fourth International; the greetings brought by Chilean militants: Luis Vitale Trotskyist militant of the Revolutionary Socialist party, Edgardo Enriquez of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolutionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left, and a comrade of the Chilean Communist League; the messages sent by the Manifesto-PD UP group and Lotta Continua (Italy), the Junta of Revolutionary Coordination of Latin America, the Argentine Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores; and finally, the greetings brought by a representative of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
The first congress of the Front Communiste Revolutionnaire, which has be come the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire thus continued the tradition of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste and the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire, dissolved by the government in June 1968 and of the ex-Ligue Communiste, dissolved in June 1973.