(The following interview with Daniel Bensaid, a member of the Political Bureau of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR-Revolutionary Communist League), French section of the Fourth International, was conducted in mid-May.]
Question. We used to speak of May 1968 as a "prerevolutionary crisis." Wouldn't it be simpler to label the twentieth century's tragedy in three acts-the Popular Front, 1944-47, and May 1968—the three French revolutions betrayed by the Communist Party?
Answer. Starting in 1968, we discussed the possible ways to characterize the "events" of May—as a revolutionary or a prerevolutionary crisis. We did this by taking the classics-Lenin's Collapse of the Second International, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution-and applying their criteria: those at the bottom no longer wish to be ruled as before, and those at the top can no longer rule as before, and so on.
We were careful to define May 1968 as a "prerevolutionary crisis," insisting on the importance of the subjective factor-that is, the existence of a revolutionary partyin order for the crisis, once it has become revolutionary, to find an outlet.
We were conscious at the time of the fact that such a party was nonexistent, or barely at an embryonic stage, and therefore that the taking of power was unthinkable under such conditions; we thereby indicated the limitations of May 1968 and of the spontaneous uprising by the masses.
Nevertheless, it was perfectly correct, given the reformist deadlock and prevailing academic theories, all of which exaggerated the inertia and bourgeoisification of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries, to forcefully point out what 1968 underscored: the vitality of the revolutionary capacity of the working class, the sharpness of the class struggle, the timeliness of the revolution.
Well, what we probably didn't do was to draw out all the conclusions from our analysis. The lack of a revolutionary party is not merely a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle; it conditions the very forms of the radicalization, the struggles and demands of the working class.
The absence of a revolutionary party is not unrelated to the fact that the largest general strike in the history of the French workers movement brought out only demands that, all told, were fairly modest. No general platform of demands gave an inkling of what was to happen later on at Lip' around such problems as the reorganization of labor and forms of struggle.
We ourselves paid inordinate attention to the most advanced forms of selforganization, such as elected strike committees, which were the exception-see Jacques Pesquet's book, Des Soviets à Saclay (Soviets at Saclay), published by Maspéro in 1968—some of which were more or less imaginary. We talked about the restarting of production at CSF in Brest, manufacturing walkie-talkies and electronic instruments-this belongs in the realm of folk tales.
Now, the exceptional character of these examples-which at least had the value of showing the way—and their small number are an indication of the low level of consciousness and organization. If, at the time, we had only had the revolutionary organization we have today, with several hundred worker activists implanted in the factories and unions, bringing the discussion into them, this would have made a qualitative difference in the general strike. From this standpoint, we can say that 1968 was the signal and starting point of tremendous workers struggles in Europe, and, at the same time, greatly limited in itself, even compared to the previous crises of 1936 and 1945.
Q. All right, then, in retrospect, can we not say that the political importance of 1968 was more the social dimension of the legacy of 1968—the crisis of bourgeois values and institutions, the general crisis of capitalist society-than the way in which the question of power was posed concretely for several days running?
A. When people say "social dimension" nowadays, they have a tendency to mean the social movements that developed later-the women's movement, ecology movements, aspects of workers struggles, and so forth. It's obvious in some cases that 1968 was the starting point-workers' insubordination, the challenging of authority, the desire to take control of production that have come out in discussions.
But take the women's movement. Their participation was massive, had its own character, and was often decisive in all the give it some sort of credibility, to make it tangible.
Should we have raised the slogan of a CP-SP government in 1968, at a time when these parties were negotiating the composition of a "people's government" with Mendès France? It is certain that our central political slogans remained extremely limited, for several years even. On the other hand, 1968 saw the revision of our thinking on the key problem, the problem of the general strike and of selforganization.
And the general strike, as the starting point of a reflection on strategy, opens up the possibility in France of an alternative to the electoralist, parliamentary policy of the traditional leaderships. From now on, our thinking on 1968 will have to be coupled with what appears to be its opposite: the 1978 electoral defeat.
The experiment remained unfinished. What makes it hard to talk about 1968 is that we are not dealing with a closed experience, complete in itself. We are still in the midst of 1968 inasmuch as the lessons of 1968 are not those of May and June, but those of ten years, extending from the general strike to the establishment of the Common Program and Union of the Left, up to the electoral sellout of March 1978 that put the finishing touch on the betrayal of 1968. It is up to the vanguard to draw from this the basis for a political and strategic alternative.
Q. Not only did the bourgeoisie retain power, but in spite of the persistence of the general social crisis and the economic crisis, it seems that the ruling class was able to deal worse blows to the French workers than in previous years, at least since the first Barre government in August 1976. So didn't we tend to be too optimistic, to think that by themselves, workers strug gles would manage to grow over into a revolutionary crisis (we said that May 1968 was a "dress rehearsal")? And isn't it legitimate to ask ourselves whether the recent electoral defeat, in a nutshell, marks the end of a period-the one inaugurated by May 1968, to be precise?
A. This is a tricky subject, and I'm going to be careful! But the starting point that remains absolutely true, where we committed no real error, is that 1968 marked the beginning of an impetuous rise of struggles and of the workers movement in France and throughout Europe.
Look at the whole picture: May 1968 in France, the struggles in Italy in the autumn of 1969, the 1974-75 explosion in Portugal, the first six months of 1976 in Spain, during which the world record for the number of days on strike was broken, the Italian workers movement again in 1976—we cannot deny the explosive upsurge of the West European workers movement. If you deny that, if you retain your skepticism in face of the series of ups and downs that mark the course of the class struggle, you ignore the fundamental, underlying tendencies of the political situation.
It is impossible to understand the post- Franco period without taking this upsurge of workers struggles into account. The internal maneuvers of the decaying regime cannot explain this process. But the February 1976 strikes in Madrid, and the outpouring in the Basque country after the Vitoria massacre precipitated the downfall of the Arias government, and the establishment of democratic institutionalization around the Suárez government.
In France, we haven't reached such peaks, mainly for economic reasons (however, we did make some mistakes in analyzing the evolution of the French economy and its political consequences at the time of the Chaban-Delmas "progressive contracts" and the devaluation of the franc in 1969). But even leaving aside the bigger strikes-1947-48, 1953, 1963—the average frequency of strikes is still higher than it was in the past decade. Even if the number of strike days in France is three times less than in Britain, and four times less than in Italy.
Incidentally, we should note that the increase in conflicts, in their duration, has not been reflected in a proportional growth of the workers organizations and their influence. The membership of the trade ake camore, ush the ather unions has remained constant relative to the number of wage earners, and the CGT has suffered a setback, although the other unions have maintained themselves.
Here we run across the paradoxical combination handed down from 1968: militancy combined with a low level of consciousness, producing hardly any gains for the workers organizations except at the polls, which, while not inconsiderable, is still much too limited.
Should we therefore conclude that we made major errors of prognosis? Our estimate of how struggles would develop was correct; it has been corroborated, even allowing for the adjustments made for French conditions.
The point on which we had a fairly onesided view of the social processes, of mounting struggles, was our underestimathe weight of tion of the reformist bureaucracies-which remained dominant in the working class in all the countries in question-and their capacity to intervene, divide, and demobilize. We misjudged the dialectical process between the social radicalization and the policy of the reformist leaderships. We can look at the past two years for a better understanding of the prospects.
In France, the SP and CP orchestrated the electoral defeat by dividing the working class. But the question that comes up right away is, How could they impose such divisions without encountering unified opposition among the ranks of the workers movement-without a certain loss of control, without more widespread, clear attempts to break away from the bureaucracies, such as might have occurred if the subjective maturity of the working class had been greater? Three factors help explain this:
First, the effects of the 1974-75 recession, the austerity policies put into effect in the various countries, together with the stabilization of a large number of unemployed. Without there having been a defeat for the working class anywhere, we could say there was an attrition in some sectors, a fragmentation of fronts of struggle leading to an undeniable weakening of the necessary reactions to the capitalist attacks.
Second, the policy of the reformists, their tactic of struggles, their electoralism, disarm and disorient even the vanguard elements.
Finally, the cumulative impact of the partial, limited defeats in southern Europe that Ernest Mandel talks about at the end of his article (see Intercontinental Press/- Inprecor, June 12, 1978, p. 696).
It seems reasonable to say that while none of these defeats constitutes a decisive setback in itself (we cannot even compare the defeat of November 25, 1975, in Portugal to the July days of 1917 in Russia), their simultaneous occurrence in France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal probably ushers in a new political situation, one in which, without a qualitative reversal of the relationship of forces, the problems are posed differently, in a way that makes the dayto-day struggles of the workers more difficult, especially with regard to connecting their fight against austerity to the overall political solutions.
And yet, this new situation, these new difficulties are accompanied by relatively intense thinking and political discussion, and the necessity for real political solutions can only occur more and more to a growing number of advanced workers and trade-union officials, who at the same time are trying to decide where to place the blame for the defeats and how to overcome them.
The connections between mass movements and political solutions are now more than ever a question whose time has come. And the transition, over a decade, from a mass movement with no alternative to an electoral alternative with no mass movement is fairly well perceived by a mass of worker activists that is by no means insignificant. A new political situation? Granted. A change in the period? Premature, to say the least.
Q. To put it more precisely, can we expect that, paradoxically, the repeated failures of the mass workers parties in Western Europe will result in a thoroughgoing challenge to the line adopted by these parties-a challenge, we should add, that no longer appears confined to a few intellectuals, who formerly posed no threat to the leaderships, and which we hope will not be entirely right-wing in character, intensifying the "Eurocommunist" drive of the Stalinist parties?
A. Whether or not the workers latch onto the debate that has been launched inside the French CP, for example, largely depends on the struggles ahead and the kind of lessons that will or will not be drawn, on the basis of previous years.
It is unthinkable that a workers' left opposition could develop in a period of relative social peace. Marxism has its logic, after all, and the least we can ask, really, is that it work itself out-and that we understand it!
diagnose a deepening
Either we downturn-and, in that case, it is likely that the reformist parties will undergo only some erosion and minor splits on their left flanks, while at the same time generating essentially opportunist, rightwing currents that will speed up, in the case of the CPs, their process of "socialdemocratization."
Or, we think that there hasn't been any turnabout in the period, and therefore, let's be consistent: the challenges that are already visible will go in two directionstoward a hardening on the right, in the Elleinstein mold, which may, incidentally, take with it the support of a section of the trade-union bureaucracy-but also one or more waves of criticism, left breakaways, capable of giving rise to relatively large currents, left centrist currents, inside the reformist workers parties and in the unions.
That is the prognosis we can make, provided we use caution with respect to the timetable. The attacks on the working class are continuing and will continue; there has been no major defeat that prohibits the working class from fighting; and the French CP has even verbally dissociated itself from the SP, refusing to administer or endorse austerity, but also taking care not to launch any real battles that would match its actions to its words.
But will this organized inactivity hold up under the repeated attacks of the bosses and austerity? A prognosis of the situation and the period largely depends on what answer is given to that question. If the layoffs proliferate, with uncontrolled factory closings, if ten or twenty struggles in major sectors of the civil administration and in bastions of industry end in a series of huge defeats, then of course, the rate of demoralization will become significant, together with what that can generate.
On the other hand, if a counteroffensive takes shape around one or two poles of resistance, the critical questioning of the strategy of the reformist political and trade-union leaderships will unfailingly deepen and spread. At least among a working-class vanguard, which, as everyone now agrees, is radicalizing mainly within the reformist parties and trade unions.
Q. Now we come to the far left. Isn't it in a paradoxical situation? Many of the demands that it was alone in raising in 1968 and after have been won, or taken up by the organized workers movement, such as those centering around the quality of life. The far left has even entered the political arena in its own right, including on the electoral plane. But nearly everywhere it is said to be in crisis, in Italy, for instance, and even in France. In particular, here in France, for the last two or three years, we have met with growing difficulties in organizing common campaigns with the other revolutionary organizations. So, two questions. First, under these conditions, what would you say are the prospects for the far left in Europe and in France? Second, looking back on our own past, what are the main political errors we committed in recent years? Could we have done substantially better? The revolutionary process has turned out to be slower than we expected. Is this entirely due to objective factors?
A. The crisis of the revolutionary organizations in Spain, Portugal, Italy and France is a reality that cannot be ignored. It is connected to the fact that most of these organizations are products of the post-1968 radicalization, without historic links to the international workers movement. Hence their obvious lack of preparedness to deal with the central problem—unifying the working class, and thus the relationship of these new organizations to those that already hold sway, the trade unions and political parties.
This is even truer for the Maoist currents, which start out by consigning the reformist parties, the CPs, to oblivion, only to suffer a rude awakening when the reformists' clout, at least in the elections, calls them back to order and to reality, and even when internal divisions within these parties come to light. It was in this way that we could see how the Spanish CP was able to reintegrate, reabsorb certain groups like Bandera Roja.
/thout a full programmate and stra egic line of opposition, combined with consistent battle for workers unity and a united front with these parties, most of the far-left groups have continually oscillated between ultraleft rejection, overestimating the relationship of forces—as in Portugal during the preparations for November 25, 1975—and opportunistically adapting to the reformist parties or applying pressure tactics to these parties, more or less fitting in with the logic of these parties.
A typical example: the Italian PUP,* which may well appear as a group critical of the CP, but in no way as an organizational and strategic alternative. Or again, in Spain, a big Maoist group like the PTS comes out with the same positions as the CP, even to the right of it where alliances with the bourgeoisie are concerned.
In France, judging by the legislative elections, and the campaigns carried out by the various organizations to the left of the CP, the record is anything but outstanding. In what way did they campaign against the SP and CP policy of dividing the working class? And in what way did they prepare for the post-election period?
Here it must be said that even those organizations whose roots supposedly go deep in the history of the revolutionary movement, and whose background and traditions, like Lutte Ouvrière and the OCI, supposedly come out of the Trotskyist movement, and which continue to base themselves on it, were in no way protected or forewarned against major deviations.
In the OCI's case, this took the form of adaptation to the reformist bureaucracies, with a campaign centered exclusively on standing down in the second round' without intervening in the debate on program. This in no way prepared for the elections and their aftermath, and conferred totally uncritical support on the Social Democratic leadership as opposed to the CP leadership. In Lutte Ouvrière's case, it took the form of abstention on the need to defeat the right, on unity of the working class, on standing down, on the need for a CP-SP government, and so on.
Finally, what is our problem? It's that our situation is fairly new. We want to build revolutionary workers parties starting from a position of being nearly totally outside the working class—which was not the case with the CPs as compared to the SPs. Therefore, all our experience handed down over decades of isolation-on the workers united front, on transitional demands, raised in a propagandistic way, and more or less directed at members of the reformist parties so that they would take them up themselves-has had to be put into practice as the independent line of a major organization, even if it is numerically small.
5. Organisation Communiste Internationalisteinternationalist Communist Organization
Thus, we are running into concrete tactical and political problems that cannot be solved simply by consulting books. That is what explains why each group claiming to be Trotskyist has its own interpretation of the writings in question and such different reactions to any given situation.
Have we committed major errors and could we have changed the course of events? We committed big errors in the past decade, that is undeniable. Up to 1972, what mainly separated us from the reformists was our tactics of struggle, "daring to struggle," "how to struggle." In the unions, supporting across-the-board wage increases as against percentage increases, or the sliding scale, were sufficient to mark the dividing line between us and the leadership during contract negotiations.
When the Common Program was signed, we understood fairly quickly that there had been a change in the political situation, even though the Third Congress of the Ligue Communiste [Communist League, forerunner of the LCR], in December 1972, did not avoid mistakes and fumbling. But it must be admitted that it took several years to assimilate the change and its consequences on our line, and that this has only now been completed. We did not really get ahead of the situation; we grasped it as we went along, through a series of adaptations.
So, yes, we could have had a clearer line at the outset, especially on the united front. We could have had a different impact on the situation, first and foremost on the evolution of the far-left organizations and their debates on line, while at the same time winning broader influence. As to whether we could have radically changed the outcome of events, that I do not think was possible. There are some relationships of forces that it is impossible to jump over.
But what we should understand is that even in 1968, the question of the united front was posed in a way that was quite abstract. The fact that the phenomena of self-organization were limited meant that CP activists were hardly at all involved in structures where they would have had to answer for their actions and leave the parliamentary and electoralist terrain.
There was an almost total separation between the arena of struggles, where we intervened to the extent of our forces, and the parliamentary arena, which we, of course, left to the reformists, who, naturally, made it into the only general political solution imaginable.
We only made up for our delay on the united front when the Common Program and the resurgence of the SP once again made it a current issue. We could have and should have avoided this delay and the errors associated with it; but, over and above the programmatic continuity of the Fourth International, there was, in fact, a certain break in continuity between generations of activists, which partially accounts for the mistakes made in 1968 and after.
Without going into detail here on our obvious errors, we should point out their common base, namely our failure to pose the problem of the united front until 1972. From this stemmed the glaring weakness
, thinkingking of our transitional demands, because since
Largely ine
1968 we had been thinking largely in terms of a general outflanking of the
This led us to be suspicious of all slogans having to do with workers control, and to be satisfied with a very rudimentary analysis of the development and contradictions of class consciousness, such as the relations the workers have with the reformist organizations. That was the starting point for our disconnection from the battles for control, for transitional slogans, and from the governmental slogan that should crown our approach.
From this angle, in one or another struggle, we find traces of ultraleftist or workerist positions that left their mark on our activities, even though each of them must be placed in its own context, which was more complex than it appears. Nevertheless, the general framework is as I have just described. And since 1972, a process of rectification has been under way, with its half-finished aspects, its contradictions, its partially continued errors.
It will be the task of the LCR's Third Congress to go back over all these questions; for if we expect the advanced workers to draw a balance sheet on the past decade, it is up to us to do the same! This congress will have to put our evolution over the last few years into perspective, characterize the period, evaluate our battle last year for unity of the working class, draw a balance sheet on the Union of the Left, and size up the situation of the far left.
Those are four basic elements that will enable us to turn the corner on the ten years that we have just lived through. But the essential thing is that the congress must deal with the tasks that we will face in the period ahead.
Q. Let's broaden this out, finally, to the international level. The Fourth International analyzed 1968 as the "year of a turning point in the world situation"-for the colonial revolution, it was the Tet offensive; the "Prague spring" illustrated the upturn in the political revolution in the bureaucratically deformed workers states; and the French and Italian prerevolutionary crises, the starting point for the social ist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. There again, we are tempted to ask whether we did not overestimate the convergence of these three sectors of the world revolution.
A. The remarkable unity of the world revolution in 1968 was immediately perceptible to revolutionists at the time, given the ideological origins of the student radicalization. This helped us, while at the same time undoubtedly keeping up certain illusions. The mass revolutionary enthusiasm of those years largely fed upon this simultaneousness, and on the opportunity to identify easily enough with a figure like Che, for instance, or with the Vietnamese revolution-especially since the latter was a component of the international communist movement, embodying the prospect of a revolutionary victory in the short run.
Nowadays we see that those who do not subscribe 100 percent to the global program, the all-embracing historic vision of the world revolution, and the synthetic analysis of Stalinism do not know which way to turn. Those who threw themselves into defending the Vietnamese revolution are bewildered by the Vietnam-Cambodia war; those who identified with the Cultural Revolution have had to witness the turbulent ups and downs of the "gang of four" and others.
In Latin America, there has been a series of defeats. All of this has produced an ebb in the spontaneous internationalism of the 1960s, and thus growing difficul ties in waging consistent internationalist campaigns, even with regard to the Portuguese revolution. As for Africa and the Mideast, the fact that the leaderships do not have Communist backgrounds and traditions creates doubt and confusion, and prevents the movements in these countries from having the same power to crystallize the international relationship of forces as the previous revolutions, from the standpoint of the emerging vanguard.
More than ever, that is what justifies the existence and the role of the Fourth International, and the further efforts we will devote to its development.
Clarification From the White House
"It's inaccurate thinking to say that the use of nuclear weapons would be the end of the human race. That's an egocentric thought. Of course, it's horrible to contemplate, but, in strictly statistical terms, if the United States used up all of its arsenal in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union used up all of its against the United States, it would not be the end of humanity. That's egocentric. There are other people on the earth."—Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in the New Yorker, May 1, 1978.
Notes
1. A nine month strike by watchmakers in Besançon, concluded in January 1974. One of the longest strikes in French history, it included a two-and-a-half month occupation of the factory in which the workers operated the plant themselves.
2. Accords modeled on that signed December 10, 1969, between union and management officials at Electricité de France, the state-owned power utility. The agreement, which ended a strike of several days, tied wage increases for two years to productivity and the growth in national income, and barred strikes for the duration of the contract. It was followed by a series of similar accords in other state-owned sectors.
3. Confédération Générale du Travail-General Confederation of Labor, the largest labor federation, dominated by the Communist Party.
4. Partito d'Unità Proletaria-Party of Proletarian Unity.
5. Partido del Trabajo-Labor Party.
7. French elections are held in two rounds. Only candidates who poll 12.5 percent of the vote or more are eligible to run in the second-round runoff. Traditionally, the workers parties agree beforehand to stand down in favor of the workers candidate with the best chance of winning.