On December 18, 1979, a petition calling for "unity in struggles" was issued over the signatures of 100 activists from the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and independents. The petition called for "action" at the "rank-and-file level." It was written with clarity and without trying to cover over existing differences.
Since then, this call has been signed by 45,000 people, a large number of whom are in the plants. A goal of 100,000 signatures has been put forward.
The appearance of a current composed of members of the main workers organizations that favors unity and that could ultimately be organized in rank-and-file committees is a significant development. It could be a decisive factor in the present French political situation, two years after the left's defeat in the March 1978 legislative elections and on the eve of the May 1981 presidential elections.
Changes Taking Place in the Workers Movement in France
The response the petition has received is not a fluke. Since the breakup of the Union of the Left, the most conscious workers have been mulling over the results of the last ten years of class struggle.
They are drawing the lessons of May 1968, which was a general strike without a political solution, and of the March 1978 elections, which was a pseudo-political solution without mass mobilization. They are trying to understand why it is that such a weakened regime as that of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Premier Raymond Barre-one that is tainted by scandals, reduced to governing by decree, and disavowed by its Constitutional Council-is still able to deal them the heaviest blows they have suffered in twenty years. There are 2 million unemployed; the purchasing power of workers is falling; there are attacks against the social security and health systems; and previous gains in the fields of education and public services are being taken back.
A Socialist Party leader, Pierre Mauroy, provided the answer. "If unity between the CP and SP had been consummated," Mauroy noted, "this government would fall like a dead leaf."
The Giscard-Barre government survives only because of the divisions between left parties; the divisions between the union federations, especially between the CP-led CGT and the CFDT, many of whose leaders are in the SP; the absence of a vehicle to centralize workers struggles; and the lack of political solutions.
At a time when the situation calls for a centralized and united response to the government's attacks, the most advanced workers empirically understand that the mutual attempts to trip each other up by the CP and SP, and by the CGT and CFDT, have nothing to do with the basic concerns of the workers.
The raging polemical battles between the reformist apparatuses find no echo in the real discussions that are taking place within the working class on how best to fight against the government.
These polemics are viewed as something that only concerns the general-staff politicos. At the same time, the polemics are driving a certain segment of the radicalized currents into a kind of apolitical deadend. These currents are beginning to think that the dividing line runs not between classes, but rather between the "politicos" and the masses.
Thus Huguette Bouchardeau, the na-
Call For Unity
It has been two years since the Union of the Left broke up. The patience of the most optimistic is exhausted. Discouragement is spreading and no one now knows how far such a process could go.
Meanwhile, the rightist government is using this situation, through the capitalist economic crisis, to develop new forms of domination and exploitation to profit the national and international bourgeoisie. The workers are calculating what it costs them: intolerable unemployment and inflation, setbacks to political, union, and individual rights
Abroad, French imperialism is the cop of Africa, and is maneuvering in Asia.
The French state is speeding up the installation of the European repressive role.
It would be a serious mistake to ignore a very real danger. the threat of authoritarianism that the sharp change in the political relationship of forces allows.
Only the determination of the workers, their ability to struggle in the plants, can make the government and bosses hesitate on this.
We, men and women of the left.
members of the CP. of the SP, of no party, refuse to resign ourselves to this.
tional secretary of the United Socialist Party (PSU), former CPer Roger Garaudy, and the "Ecologists" are now saying that in the second round of the presidential elections, their main consideration won't be candidates of the workers parties against candidates of the capitalist parties, but rather the "pro-nukes" on one side and the "anti-nukes" on the other.
While there is undeniable disorientation and confusion among certain sectors inside and outside the working class, the dominant characteristic of the situation is that a process of maturation, reflection, and politization is taking place within the workers movement. This is tied to a growth of antibureaucratic consciousness ("fed up to here" with the policy of the apparatuses).
The growing social discontent, the clearer understanding and consciousness about the policy of the working-class leaderships, and the desire to take charge of the struggles and control how they develop, are the early indications of deep changes taking place in the working class. They are the precursors of a change in the relationship between the reformist apparatuses and the advanced workers, especially within the unions.
Some of the signs of this changing relationship are the accumulated mistrust that increases the desire for independent organization; the positive response both to in Struggles We call for action. Unity at the rank-andfile level is possible, and is imperative. Without covering over our differences and divergences, in clarity, we call for its consummation.
First, by participating together in the workers* struggles. By responding together to all the attacks on our rights. By mobilizing together against the resurgence of fascism, racism, and antisemitism. By building the women's liberation struggle together. By everywhere pushing forward new forms of democracy against the old forms of oppression.
We do not concede that election dates, whatever their importance, should lead to substituting "general-staff strategies" for mass struggles. We demand that the conditions for unity of the left in the coming elections be discussed now, and in the open.
The only alternative to the rightist government, the only path to socialism, is the rise of a people's movement on a new and broader basis. Unity of the forces of the left is decisive for this.
We ask you to make this call for unity in struggles into a national petition by reproducing it, circulating it, and getting signatures everywhere you work and carrying out activity.
the proposals for trade-union regroupment and to the battles in the union congresses based on proposals by revolutionary socialists; and the defeats inflicted on notorious trade-union bureaucrats (for example at the CFDT congress of the Paris regional postal and telephone workers union).
In several important congresses such as the Metalworkers Federation of the CGT, which is the CT's biggest federation, and the Railway Federation, debates and even votes have shown the breadth of the audience for perspectives that correspond to the basic concerns of the workers today. These concerns are centered on fighting together to defeat the government's austerity policies.
That is the thrust of initiatives like the one taken by 500 railworkers in Rouen. They demanded that the railway federations of the CGT and CFDT jointly organize a national rail strike, renewable on a daily basis, until their demands are satisfied.
In the health-care field as well, on December 18 more than 500 hospital workers met for the first time in a coordinating assembly organized by the CFDT healthcare unions of the Paris region. A number of departmental CFDT unions (from the départements of Haute-Garonne, Tarn, Pyrénées-Orientales, Rhône, Aisne, Marne, Seine-Maritime, and the cities of Nancy and Besançon) and dozens of CGT activists also attended. The assembly came out for a renewable general strike in the health-care field "since lack of perspectives leads to shortness of breath,"
as one worker put it.
The assembly decided that the tradeunion officials in attendance should go back to their workplaces, union sections, or general assemblies and present a motion in favor of "struggle in unity, within the framework of a massive, united, renewable strike at the beginning of 1980, not aimed at the opening of negotiations, but at the satisfaction of our demands."
This aspiration to fight "all together" and in a general strike is accompanied by a desire for unity that shows the degree to which the most conscious workers understand the breadth and character of the attacks by the government and bosses.
They recognize that the rise in unemployment, the massive increase in parttime work, the weakening of the level of contractual collective guarantees (such as the gap between the wages guaranteed by the contracts and the average real wages), the growth of disparities of all kinds, the spreading practice of individualizing wages, the regional inequalities, and the discriminatory practices against women make it even more difficult to organize a common struggle.
When we add to all this the divisive practices of the very organizations that are supposed to collectively unify the fights against the bosses, we can understand the disgust that the workers feel and their desire to overcome this multi-faceted division. Symptomatic of this was a poll taken in the workforce organized by the CGT and CFDT at the Saint-Laurent des Eaux nuclear power plant. Eighty percent said they would get involved in struggle only if there was unity; 13 percent if the CGT was alone; 7 percent if the CFDT was alone; and 70 percent if the strike took place throughout the Electricité de France system.
In this context, what does the undeniable decline in union membership in the traditional bastions of the workers move ment mean? Some journalists, searching for good copy, attribute the decline to demoralization and to a sense of defeat. But that analysis does not take into account the complexity of the phenomenon. For example, in the December 12, 1979 arbitration-board elections, in which all the workers whether in unions or not had the right to vote, the 63% turn-out among workers and the 83% vote for the CGT, CFDT, and Force Ouvrière exceeded all predictions. The size of the turnout, and the virtual wipe-out of company unions, show that when confronted by the government and the bosses, the workers don't want to break ranks. But in the face of leaderships that are fighting each other, they don't want to waste their time.
Whatever one thinks of the effectiveness of such reasoning, the proof is there.
• Creal confirmed by ne Initiatives for unity that are proposed outside the traditional channels achieve a response to the petition for unity in struggles.
Difficulties Within the Traditional Organizations
The call for unity in struggles exposes the hidden crisis in the French CP, as well as the discontent among many members and intermediate cadres in the CGT (leaders of which signed the call), and internal problems in the Socialist Party.
The problems inside the workers organizations have grown considerably since the Union of the Left broke up in March 1978, and the deepening of the divisions between them has led to a real crisis in the traditional workers organizations. The crisis encompasses their relationship to the working class, their recruitment, authority, and credibility.
It is not surprising that the call for unity in struggles was first put forward by members of the CP and SP, and was then taken up massively by trade-unionists. They saw it as a way to protest the policies of their leaderships.
• In the CP, members are disoriented. There is an absence of political perspectives. The CP's sectarianism on the question of alliances and its adoption of pro- Soviet international positions are in contradiction to its adoption of a classical gradualist reformist strategy. The CP's gradualism in no way differs from the strategy of Social Democracy, where selfmanagement (which supposedly makes it possible to move toward socialism "a step at a time") means nothing more than simple co-management within the framework of the capitalist system.
The sharpening attacks against the SP, aimed at weakening that party in order to establish a balance of forces on the left that is more favorable to the CP, as well as the CP leadership's successive about-faces have hastened the development of political currents within the party and have shaken the party apparatus itself (for example the recent crisis in the Paris Federation, the resignation of members of the party's Regional Federations Bureau, the abolition of the Central Committee weekly France- Nouvelle and the magazine La Nouvelle Critique, which were replaced by the new weekly Révolution).
Aside from an overtly social-democratic orientation embodied by Jean Elleinstein, there are two CP currents that are playing an active role in the petition campaign and have evolved considerably through the petition. One current, around the magazine Dialectiques, presents itself as left Eurocommunist. The other is the "Althusserian" current around Louis Althusser.
David Kaisergruber, of the left Eurocommunist current, quite clearly differentiates himself from the parliamentarism and gradualism of Spanish CP-leader Santiago Carrillo's book Eurocommunism and the
1 from below ro favoring state. Instead rocommunism rank-and-file committees and "intervention for the workers to control all forms of government." He proposes not the abandonment of Leninism, but its critical assimilation, and he clearly rejects any perspective that aims "grosso modo to ameliorate the existing system."
In Kaisergruber's view the differences between the right and left Eurocommunists are like the differences "that were seen in other times between reformism and revolution." He acknowledges not having an analysis of the character of the USSR, while being in solidarity with the struggles against the repression there.
He is beginning to ask questions about the theory of the Leninist party, while being favorable to a "pluralism without tendencies," within the framework of a mass revolutionary party that would have to include the contribution of the far-left organizations.
the evohtion of what are caled the nAi
But the most interesting phenomenon is thusserian" militants. While it was formerly just an ideological current, today it is involved on a directly political level and has played a decisive role in launching the petition.
Opposed to the Twenty-Second Congress's abandonment of all reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat, they uphold the need to destroy the state apparatus; they come out for a socialism that develops forms of democratic power in the factories and neighborhoods, but that would also make the state wither away, especially its most repressive apparatuses.
Since the breakup of the Union of the Left, they have stepped-up their criticisms of CP policies, of its concept of alliances and of the union. They have attacked its "social democratic, reformist drift" (G. Molina in Que faire aujourd'hui), its internal functioning, and its nonrevolutionary character, which leads them to say that it is necessary to work "inside and outside the party at the same time" (G. Molina, op.
While recognizing that they do not have an answer about the character of the USSR, they taken positions siding with the workers who are fighting for their social and democratic rights in the de formed workers states and they empirically recognize that "in the countries that [the USSR] aids, it does not follow the profit motive" (G. Labica in Que faire aujourd'hui).
But today their thinking is focusing on the theory of the party. Their desire to "break with the traditional forms of politics," "to integrate the movements that are arising," to "change the mentality of each one," to question the Leninist concept of organization, all find an echo in a "nonparty" sentiment that is embryonic in the working class, an attitude that the CFDT has habitually seized upon.
The future of this current depends largely on its answer to this question of the theory of the party, on the organizational perspectives it can provide the workingclass members of the CP in particular.
Finally, a current primarily made up of working-class CP members has been organized around the magazine Luttes et débats. Their positions are close to those of revolutionary Marxism and their intervention centers on the problems of the united front, the analysis of Stalinism, and of the struggle against repression in the Eastern bloc countries.
• In the SP the problems are more widely known. They basically center on the battle between Michel Rocard and François Mitterrand for the SP's presidential nomination. Mitterrand and the CERES [Centre d'Etudes, de Recherches et d'Éducation Socialistes-Center for Socialist Studies, Research, and Education, a left-wing formation in the SP], who are more rooted in the factories, have so far greeted the petition favorably, and they are trying to use it to their advantage to pressure the CP.
Rocard, who wants nothing to do with the CP, is opposed to the petition.
• The petition has received its greatest response in the ranks of the trade unionsthe CGT and CFDT. The contradictions in the CT have-for the first time in a long while-caused public divisions in its leadership and ership and apparatus, both on Afghanistan and on the petition, which some national CGT leaders signed. Many CGT unionists who belong to the CP have used the petition to show their opposition to the CGT's tactics in struggle and to its constant subordination to the CP's policies.
In the CFDT, many members are losing the illusions that they previously had in that federation, since they reject the policy of "recentering" the union towards the right on the political spectrum, the increasingly open anticommunism of the Edmond Maire leadership, and the federation's increasingly bureaucratic methods of functioning.
The CFDT leadership, which favors a "radical reshaping of the French left," is having a harder and harder time hiding its real policies behind a smokescreen of talk about self-management and supposed inde pendence from political parties.
In fact, the CFDT lines up with the positions put forward in the SP by Michel Rocard. It is willing to try to manage the austerity programs from the left and do nothing that would in any way hinder the restructuring of industry that is now going on or the application of the plans of the bosses.
It has become more and more obvious that the CFDT is against any alliance with the CP and is, like Rocard, for an exclusive Socialist Party government. In order to get this line adopted, the CFDT leadership recently had to apply repressive measures against its members in the steel industry (at the Usinor works in Dunkerque), in the post office (in Lyon), and in banking.
These measures are just as bad as the Stalinist practices that Maire takes such pleasure in denouncing. Several directives against signing the unity petitions have also been sent to members.
To Impose Unity on the Working Class Leaderships
More than 15,000 people in the plants have signed versions of the petition that clarify the unity call. These versions express the desire for unity so the workers can go forward toward overturning the Giscard-Barre government through a general strike. Members of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the Fourth International, have played an active part in circulating these petitions.
While the question of unity is now central to the workers' concerns, it raises two other questions. Unity to what end? And how can unity be achieved?
It is to be expected that the bitter expe rience of the Common Program of the Union of the Left, when struggles were subordinated to the elections, leads the most conscious working-class activists to pose the question of the content of unity: in the factories the desire for unity is linked to the desire for centralized struggles.
In the past, militants have seen their struggles taken out of their hands. They understand that the only way a struggle can succeed is by mobilizing the workers and organizing them independently. They want this "unity in struggles" to have a central objective: the fight against the government's unprecedented austerity policy.
There cannot be unity in struggles without a response to the Barre austerity plan. And the struggle against the Barre plan is inseparable from assessing the lessons of the struggles on the railroad, in the health industry, in commerce, in steel, in the long and hard-fought Alsthom strike.
The impact of the proposals for struggling "all together" and for the general strike flows from the distrust that exists toward those who would channel the desire for unity and the willingness to struggle into high-level negotiations from which the workers would be excluded.
It is to be expected that there is a certain distrust of the national trade-union leaders. In the past, these leaders have subordinated struggles to elections and to the Common Program. Today they are signing the petition without having changed that attitude, arguing that there simply are no political perspectives at the present time.
A change of orientation must be imposed on the workers movement. Unity in action must be imposed on it. To do this we must show how unity can be achieved despite the existing differences, despite the diversity of currents.
The first meetings of "collectives" of petition signers are an initial step toward building real united-front committees. For the first time, members of the CP, the SP, the LCR, union members, and unorganized workers are meeting and acting together, without debates and differences that lead to splits. But to preserve this unity there must be real united committees that do not impose any prior conditions whatsoever for membership.
The signers of the "Call for Unity in Struggles" do not all share the same political perspective, far from it. Some of them hope to pressure the CP leadership in order to benefit the SP in the coming presidential elections. Others want to establish a new political current. Still others are looking for a substitute for the union organizations, while unionists say to themselves that it is better not to be separated from a movement that could grow.
None of this is an obstacle to unity, to the dynamic of united action, so long as no one tries to impose preconditions on joining or participating in these committees.
Some of the initiators of the petition seem to think that ideological agreement with the petition itself should be the basis for participation in the committees. Such a demand could only limit the development of the prounity current. Shouldn't the CP or SP workers who support unity but don't agree with the petition have a place in these committees? And what about those who have amended the original text of the petition by coming out for a general strike?
The discussion now taking place should make it possible to clarify these questions without endangering the goal of getting 100,000 signatures. Therefore it is necessary to avoid sectarian conceptions, a desire for exclusiveness that would transform these committees into the property of one or another political current. Much will depend on the initiatives and activities of the signers.
In the short-term, the perspective should be to prepare a united May Day demonstration of all the unions and workers parties. The signers are going into their plants and unions to push for interunion activities and to help prepare a demonstration that could express the working class's rejection of division and its desire to struggle.
On a longer-range basis, a fight that will require time and effort has already begun. This is the campaign to force all the workers parties to sign a pact agreeing that their candidates will automatically step-down in the second round of the presidential elections in favor of whichever workers candidate did best in the first round, so that Giscard can be beaten.
Through this the committees could exorcize both the "shadow of Kabul" and the threat of an exclusive Socialist Party government, and overcome the obstacle in the way of a workers victory.
• Intercontinental Press