[The following article, signed by the LCR Political Bureau, appeared in the September 22 issue of Rouge.]
A debate has opened in the entire far-left press on the Union of the Left, what it represents, and the tasks of revolutionists in relation to it. This is not an academic debate, but a discussion of differences that result in different axes of struggle and different demands.
For example, the comrades of Lutte Ouvrière think we are demonstrating our opportunism when we speak of the need for a CP-SP government. In the view of the comrades of Révolution, the question must be looked at differently now that they have termed the Socialist party a bourgeois party.
Finally, there remains the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, which printed in issue No. 766 [September 8-15] of Informations Ouvrières a lengthy answer to an article by our Comrade Yvetot. In their view, the Union of the Left amounts to much the same as the Popular Front of 1936.
It is in the context of this debate that the Political Bureau of the LCR is writing to clarify the position of the Ligue on this question.
Is Union of Left a Popular Front?
Apart from the dispute over terminology, this seems to be an empty question, since we say the Union of the Left is a classcollaborationist front, while the others answer that every class-collaborationist front is a popular front!
In fact, the real question is the following: How does the class collaboration of the major workers parties become clear before the eyes of the masses?
The OCI mechanically and loudly repeats quotations from the analysis in our "classics," independently of the concrete historical situation.
For example, before the First World War, the Russian reformists (the Mensheviks) had a socialist program close to that of the Bolsheviks. But when the revolution of 1917 broke out, at a time when the Mensheviks were a majority of the working class, these same Mensheviks said that this program was not on the agenda, and that state power should go to the main bourgeois party (the Cadets), so as to limit the revolution to bourgeois-democratic reforms.
Similarly, at the beginning of the 1930's, when the Communist party was in an ultraleft period and had not yet made the popular-front turn, it called for the expropriation of capital and "soviets everywhere," at every instance and regardless of the situation. But when the general strike of 1936 actually placed soviets on the order of the day, the CP said that the struggle should be limited to the defense of bourgeois democracy against fascism, and that power should go to the Radical party, the main bourgeois formation of the Third Republic.
In these two situations, the demand made by the revolutionists on the reformists, for a break with the bourgeois parties so as to put in practice the socialist program, had an enormous impact on the ranks of those parties. The Russian reformist leaders, the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries, saw their ranks go over to the Bolsheviks. They complained, "The Bolsheviks have taken over our program."
There is nothing similar in the situation in France. First, there is no qualitative difference between the program of the SP, the program of the CP, and the Common Program of the SP and CP that was signed later by the small bourgeois grouping, the Left Radicals. Accordingly, it is impossible to say seriously that the SP and CP had to make significant programmatic concessions to the so-called Left Radicals. To the contrary, even the SP's signing of the Common Program appeared to numerous worker militants as a step to the left in which the SP thereby agreed to a lasting alliance with the CP.
Furthermore, if it is true that the Left Radicals are a bridge to the main bourgeois parties, to say, as the OCI does, that in a government of the left the Left Radicals would be "the representatives in that government of the class interests of the exploiting bourgeoisie," is to pass over in silence the fact that the main representative of bourgeois interests in such a government will be Mitterrand himself, with the support and collaboration of Georges Marchais.
The Union of the Left, whose program is the program of the reformist workers parties and in which the Left Radicals are only a nod toward the main bourgeois parties, cannot be analyzed in the same way as the "historic compromise" of the Italian Communist party. The price for that alliance with the Christian Democracy, the main bourgeois party in power for thirty years, was the CP's renunciation of the slightest anticapitalist measures.
The Tasks of Revolutionists
To determine the tasks and demands that will enable the masses to go forward, it is essential to analyze concretely the way they view the government. And, from that point of view, it cannot be said that there is a qualitative difference between an SP-CP-Left Radical government applying the Common Program and a CP-SP government applying the Common Program.
In both cases, the workers will have initial illusions that it is their government, when in fact it will simply be a bourgeois government in disguise.
Under the illusion that this government is their own, the workers will want to go forward. But they will confront the obstacle of class collaboration by their traditional parties. Under the guise of respect for the constitution of 1958, Mitterrand has begun saying that Giscard should be kept as president. That is why we today denounce their commitment to respect the Gaullist constitution and why we raise the perspective of a constituent assembly. Mitterrand and Marchais explain that 51 percent is not enough and will seek to broaden the government to the right.
That is why we today denounce the alliance with the Left Radicals and are preparing the workers to demand an SP-CP government without representatives of the bourgeois parties.
In face of the development of workers control and self-defense, they call for "Republican order." That is why we today call on the workers to refuse to defer their struggle to electoral timetables. That is why we today call for their organizations to unite in action against the austerity plan.
In this way, we show the workers both the road to getting rid of Giscard and imposing an SP-CP government, as well as the tasks this government must carry out if it is not to be a government that simply manages the crises of capitalism, but a government that opens the road to workers power.
To be sure, the immense majority of the workers who have confidence in the SP and CP will see this as a form of pressure against their leaderships. But for our part, we will not develop any illusions and will refuse to support an SP-CP government that applies the Common Program (with or without the Left Radicals).
Opportunism in Name of Great Principles?
The OCI on the other hand thinks that independently of all programmatic considerations, "the call for a CP-SP government, without representatives of the bourgeois parties" represents "the line of the workers united front." They further believe that this leads to a government that, in their own words, "cannot be characterized as a 'workers government'"!
Is it possible to make sense of this? Only if the workers united front is defined as unity of the workers parties on no matter what programmatic basis, so long as it includes no bourgeois party or grouping!
That amounts to reducing the united front to the unity of the reformist leaderships! And it shows how the most rigorous demands for a break with the Left Radicals end up masking the most spineless criticism of the reformists themselves, particularly the Socialist party.
During the prerevolutionary crisis in Portugal before November 25, we saw where this opportunist line of limiting the break with the bourgeoisie solely to a break with the bourgeois parties leads. The OCI raised the formula of an "SP-CP government led by Soares, without the military and without representatives of the bourgeois parties, responsible to the Constituent Assembly." And since the SP had also demanded that the military leave the government and called for sovereignty to the Constituent Assembly, the OCI discovered a thousand virtues in the Portuguese SP, including that "it has never broken a strike (Informations Ouvrières, No. 720)."
In a situation like that, a break with the bourgeoisie implied not only a break with the military hierarchy and the bourgeois parties, but also and above all support to the emerging organs of dual power (workers committees, workers commissions, and so forth) and their strengthening, centralization, and coordination.
But "what political struggle will give birth to and centralize these committees?" the OCI asks. They answer, by "fighting for a break with the bourgeoisie, in the concrete form of a break with the bourgeois parties present in the government." Thus the committees will not be centralized by the demand for the extension of workers control, the elaboration of a national plan, and the centralization of self-defense, but by the demand that the Left Radicals get out!
Such an orientation amounts to making the mass movement dependent on the unity of the reformist leaderships, to transforming the revolutionary party from a party of class action to an oppositionist party concentrating its fire on those same leaderships.
From their condemnation of the barricades in 1968, to their total passivity during the repression of the soldiers movement, and their refusal to participate in the Lip march, the OCI has shown in practice its dependence on the reformist leaderships.
Tomorrow, when Mitterrand, like Soares, will demand the end of "anarcho-populism," the end of the "parallel power of the committees," and "respect for Republican legality represented by the National Assembly," will we see the OCI adamantly demanding that the Left Radicals leave, so as to call for an SP-CP parliamentary majority?
Such an attitude pushes the OCI "into parliamentarism," as Charles Berg acknowledged in a self-critical article that appeared in Informations Ouvrières before the last OCI congress. 14 The article apparently had no impact, since it is in the name of "respect for the rule of democracy" (sic) that the OCI has just launched a call for the dissolution of the National Assembly.
14. Informations Ouvrières No. 726, November 13-20, 1975.