The powerful movement sweeping France has outflanked the big mass organizations such as the Communist party and the General Federation of Labor [CGT], whose leaderships were firmly committed to a reformist policy. Now, they are making just as much of a turn as is neces-
• to regain control of the masses and sary contain them within the bounds of the capitalist system.
The movement is such that very small revolutionary organizations obviously cannot lead it. Nevertheless, the interventions of such groups and the positions which they have taken in these events make it possible to judge them politically. This is particularly true in regard to the movements which have developed among the students. These movements have had a not inconsiderable influence and have been able to play if not a leading role often a crucial or decisive one.
While it is still too early to make an overall estimation, let us note initially that the JCR [Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire -- Revolutionary Communist Youth] and its members have been in the forefront of all the struggles and have exhibited a much greater political capacity than all the other youth groups to all the very broad layers in the movement.
In the course of these events, collaboration has developed between the Union Communiste [Communist Union, publishes Voix Ouvrière -- "Workers Voice"] and the PCI [Parti Communiste Internationaliste -- Internationalist Communist party -- the French section of the Fourth Internationall. An initial public document declared:
"In view of the development of the present situation, which cruelly points up the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and considering that it is essento unify the struggle carried on by tial the organizations claiming to be Trotskyist, representatives of the Union Communiste (UC), the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (the French section of the Fourth International) and the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire met on Sunday, May 19, 1968, and decided to form a permanent coordinating committee for their three organizations. Ihis coordinating committee now calls on all organizations claiming to be Trotskyist to join in this move. The three organizations advise their members everywhere to come together to coordinate their activity.
By Pierre Frank
"For the UC: G. Kaldy and J. Morand.
"For the PCI: P. Frank and M. Lequenne.
D. Benslid, the JCR: A. Krivine and
On the other hand, the line followed by the FER [Fédération des Etudiants Révolutionnaires -- Federation of Revolutionary Students], an organization recently created by the youth who follow the OCI [Organization Communiste Internationaliste -- Internationalist Communist Organization -- the French ally of the Socialist Labour League in England], makes cooperation with this organization impossible at present.
It may be fruitful to make known the role that the FER has played in this movement. In general, it has sought to gain the maximum publicity by means of violent but abstract statements. Its actions, however, far from impelling the vanguard forward and strengthening it have often been aimed at holding it back.
Their basic outlook will come as a surprise to no one. It was expressed in a declaration made two or three days before the start of the action in the Latin Quarter:
"In isolation the students will be defeated." I might add that they expressed an identical pessimism on the international front. A few days before the Tet offensive, the monthly Révoltes [the FER organ] published articles claiming that the military defeat of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam was inevitable because of the Washington-Moscow understanding.
In the early days of the movement in the Latin Quarter, they opposed any show of force by the
• students in their struggle. Their prime objective was to have the demonstrations outside the offices of the trade-union bureaucracies, in order to have an opportunity to denounce them.
The mass demonstration on May 10 ended in the night of the barricades. Although this was not foreseen, everyone knew that there would be a confrontation with the forces of bourgeois order. It happened that the FER had organized a meeting in the Mutualité for that evening. What did its leaders do when confronted with an unexpected situation? Toward the end of the demonstration, they broke away to go hold their meeting, at which there to go hold their meeting, ats tar, to sewere about 1,000 people.
rious objections could be raised. But after their meeting, at about 1:00 a.m., they brought their members to the barricades to tell everyone there that it was all an adventure and that they had to abandon the barricades...and then they went home.
In their call for the general strike demonstration of May 13 they insisted on emphasizing that it had been launched by the trade unions. But when the demonstration reached the Place Denfert-Rochereau and the vanguard militants decided to continue the demonstration to the Champs de Mars they again raised the bogey of adventurism and abstained.
They tried to explain at the Sorbonne why they had not been on the barricades. Here, moreover, 1s what one of their top spokesmen wrote in the faris daily Combat of May 17: "The irresponsibility of some leaders of the March 22 Movement and the JCR in calling on a few thousand students to retake the Sorbonne unaided, resulted in the organization of a terrible massacre by the forces of order. For, de Gaulle could not let the symbol of the state, the Latin Quarter, bristle with barricades. Iwenty or thirty thousand students cannot successfully take on thousands of Gardes Mobiles [Mobile Guarâs] and CRS [Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité-- Republican Security Companies - the militarily armed and trained elite state security police].
Therefore, and I am not afraid to write it, we were right, after we had marched to the barricades, to call on the students to break up this demonstration; it was inevitably going to turn into a massacre.
"Here, more than the irresponsibility and backwardness of petty-bourgeois of the Cohn-Bendit stripe, we must blame the reactionary policy of the CP and CGI
leadership, who by waiting until May 13 to call for the working class to join the students, left the latter to face formidable concentrations of Gardes Mobiles and CRS alone for eight days." (C. Berg, member of the national committee of FER, Combat, No. 7414, May 17, 1968.)
To top it all off, they denounced the events at the Sorbonne as a "carnival." The sectarians did not understand that despite some excesses of bizarre they were seeing a revolutionary groups, center of the movement, a model for "comnittees" (soviets), embodying workers' democracy. They
• totally misjudged the importance of the fact that the many vanguard groups were present in the Sorbonne court- Jard and that the members of the CP had to stand beside them, where they usually louna themselves on the defensive before their audiences.
I might mention in passing that the pressure of the students was so strong that the pro-Chinese felt themselves compelled to take away their picture of Stalin at the end of the first day.
I'hus, the OCI members (who lead the FER), despite their pseudorevolutionstatements, placed themselves outside ary the militant vanguard which carried the struggle in the Latin Quarter to a very high political level. At the same time, they sought to intervene in the workers movement without taking account of its development, attempting to unmask the by maneuvers which could not leaderships be effective in view of their weakness.
In this manner, while the great mass of students were carrying out monster demonstrations which shook public opinion, lorcing the apparatuses to change their course to regain control of they went to l'Humanité
[organ of the French CP] and the Bourse du Travail [the union headquarters] to put the bureaucrats on the spot.
They thought basically that in such circumstances the way to impel the workers movement forward was to make publicity-catching declarations. They did not understand how much the political level could be raised by mass demonstrations. Let me note in addition that when one of their members got a chance to speak on television, he fell into the trap laid by the government, which wanted to scare the public. When asked what his perspective was, he replied in essence: Our perspective is not dialogue; it is civil war.
To our knowledge their militants in the provinces, left more to their own devices, have reacted more healthily. They have not thrown cold water on the demonstrations and jelled adventurism, as in Paris.
lere is what sauvageot, the leader of the UNEF
French National Students
Union], had to say about them in an interview in the paper of the PSU LParti socialiste Unifie - United Socialist party - the left socialist partyl, Tribune Socialiste, May 16:
"I have absolutely nothing against the small groups; I criticize the political line of some among them which has not enabled them to adapt themselves to a situation that they have been unable to foresee and which has prevented them from playing a leading role. lake lor example the FER or the UJCMI [Union de Jeunesse Communiste (Marxiste-Léniniste) -- Joung Communist Federation (Marxist-Ieninist) -- Maoists.. Although they have different positions, they are united in a common rigidity which has prevented them from integrating themselves in the dynamic of the movement.
"The militants of the FER quit the field of battle on Friday evening May 10 because they considered the decision to stay in the Latin Quarter adventuristic. Nevertheless, there it was that the fight took place and it was waged without them. Those who over the years have persistently put forward slogans of going over the head of the union organizations, now continually advocate lining up with the positions of the union leaderships, which fall far short of the demands of the moment. It is apparent to what dubious positions this line has led...
"The attitude of other political groups such as the JCR, the ESU IPSU students], the 'March 22 Movement' at Nanterre has been very different. Because these groups have been able to understand the significance of the student struggles, because, despite everything that separates them, they have a common political basis so far as the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggles are concerned. For example, they have been able to integrate themselves into the movement, to be driving forces in it, and to approach the problem of extending our struggles in a valid way."
I already mentioned the pessimism they exhibited both about the war in Vietnam and about the struggle of the students. This similarity is not accidental; it is rooted in a single basic conception of the socialist revolution that might be termed "superproletarian."
Proceeding from the essential Marxist proposition that the proletariat
According to an April 21 dispatch from Prague by Agence France-Presse, the admission of Trotsky's assassin into Czechoslovakia has been hotly debated in Prague for the third time this year. The assassin, known as Jacques Mornard, entered Czechoslovakia in 1960 following his release from a Mexican prison after serving the maximum twenty-year sentence.
The noted Czech writer, Jan Prochazka, recently restored deputy chairman of the
Writers Union, has published a magazine article in which he asked Vaclav David, former Minister of Foreign Affairs under
Novotny, why the murderer of the exiled Russian revolutionist had been given a Czech passport and a plane ticket to Prague by the Czech embassy in Mexico City eight years ago.
(Mornard's present whereabouts and should play the leading role in order to assure victory, they have failed to grasp how, in given conditions, other classes (like the poor peasantry in the underdeveloped countries) or other categories (such as the student Jouth) can play, before the proletariat has been decisively explosive role las th te either a mobilized in great numbers case of great peasant masses) or a role as detonator where students are involved.
They could have found valuable warnings by Trotsky on this point in articles written during the Spanish revolution during the 1930's and reprinted in volume three of the French edition of his writings. The dialectical interaction between the class struggle of the proletariat and the struggle of other classes or social layers is alien to the sectarians. In their eyes, so far as the peasants or petty bourgeoisie is concerned, there can be no socialist revolution unless the workers stand at its head.
Indubitably, the attitude of the members of the OCI and the FER has not served the cause of Trotskyism. Iet's hope they will discard the frenzy into which they have plunged, that they will become sensitive to the prevailing atmosphere in the vanguard of the movement, and, finally, that they will come to understand the necessity for the different organizations claiming to be Trotskyist to present to this vanguard the stance of militants, who, while they have disagreements that cannot be glossed over, are nonetheless able to act together on many issues and to discuss in a fraternal spirit.
activities have not been made public.)
Prochazka declared that this step compromised the good name of Czechoslovakia.
So far as is known, this is the first time that the issue of Trotsky's slaying by an agent of Stalin has been publicly raised and discussed in a Sovietbloc country. The fact that the matter has been so sharply and squarely posed by one of the leading spokesmen for the more militant liberalizers indicates the scope and depth of the anti-Stalinism sweeping Czechoslovakia today.
The protest also foreshadows the likelihood of similar queries about Trotsky, his ideas and his movement in intellectual and political circles elsewhere in East Europe.