FROM THE BANKRUPICY OF NEOCAPITALISM TO THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
By Ernest Mandel is only a reflection of the outmoded economic and social structures of the Walloon area, which are not neocapitalist but predate neocapitalism. The neocapitalist Walloon area of tomorrow will no longer experience such romantic outbursts."
Then along came Greece, which in June-July of 1965 experienced an uprising of the masses outstripping anything seen in that country since the very beginning of the working-class movement. But, once again, the skeptics had a ready-made explanation: "Greece, an underdeveloped country, is an exceptional case in Europe. It can, at most, serve as a model of what vill happen in Spain and Portugal, but never as a model for what lies in wait for the most industrially advanced countries of the continent.!
Yet here we find the same events repeated in France, that very France with large nationalized sector, whose "strong represented, until a little while ago, a model of stability, the country that typified enlightened and rational neocapitalism. And, irony of ironies, the revolt did not burst forth from some underdevelopea region, some mining area where unemployment is rampant, from the most poorly paid or peasant levels, but precisely from the very towns around Paris that had become the prototype of the "consumer society," from the top-wage Renault plants, the Renault plants of skilled toolmakers and machinists -- hardly "prisoners of starvation."
This time it will be absolutely necessary to bow to the logic of events -- or else stand guilty of deliberate distortion. It has now been proved that a neocapitalist regime, which eliminates starvation and the most abject poverty of the proletariat -- at least in the imperialist metropolis -- and which succeeds in avoiding the most catastrophic economic crises (at the cost of constant deterioration of its monetary system), cannot in any way eliminate the basic sources of proletarian revolutions.
Remaining intact at the very heart of the regime are all the contradictions of capitalism analyzed by Marx, to which have been added new contradictions. The accumulated explosive materials are such that periodic explosions are not only possible but even inevitable.
The task of every socialist and communist who really wants the overthrow of the capitalist regime is to prepare himself for those days of reckoning, to work patiently and with perseverance so that those opportunities are not lost and so that after the explosion everything pattern doesn't fall back into the same in exchange for a few reforms.*
For the other aspect of the realities of the situation is just as striking as the elemental strength of the mass movement.
Sure enough the fighting spirit of the ocche students and vanguard workers. upation of factories, railroad stations. electric power plants, the red flags flying everywhere over these strategic points, all express the desire of the masses to have done with the capitalist regime and to take power. The calls for "Workers Power!" "All Power to the Workers!" "A Socialist Republic!" have been taken up a thousand times at meetings and demonstrations all across France. But there are also objectives, foisted on the movement by its official leaderships, that make every effort to bring the movement back into the framework of a "refurbished" capitalist society.
At this point it is necessary to puncture a myth. The leaders of the French CGI, the Séguys and the Benoit Frachons, talk as if the "leftists," the "anarchists," the "Trotskyists," in short all those who launched this remarkable struggle, scorn the immediate demands of the workers, i.e., wage increases, reduction of the workweek, repeal of the laws curtailing social security, etc.
This is utterly false. The criticism not at those pectect suer demande but at leveled by the Left at_the CP
the act of limiting the objectives of this irresistible tidal wave to such immediate demands.
Anyone with an iota of political sense has been able to perceive the confluence of the efforts of the Gaullist regime and those of the CGI to reduce the general strike (for which the CGI continues to refuse to issue a call, just as did the national FGTB [Fédération
Générale des Iravailleurs de Belgique -- Belgian General Federation of Labor) in Belgium in December 1960) to a simple movement for immediate demands.
The tougher Pompidou is with the "rioters," the harder he pushes for negotiations with the unions. The more the union leaders disassociate themselves from odic explosions of general strikes can be predicted -- such as the strikes of June 1936 and December 1960-January 1961 -- in the principal countries of Western Europe in our study,
"Une stratégie socialiste pour 1'Europe occidentale, " which appeared in the May-June 1965 issue (No. 9) of the Revue Internationale du Socialisme. Interested readers may obtain a copy by writing to I.D.I., 29 rue Descartes, Paris 5, OI to the Revue's offices at Via della Dogana Vecchia 5, 00186 Rome.
the student "provocateurs," the more those leaders seek to accelerate the liqvidation of the movement by an agreement negotiated with the Gaullist regime.
Beyond a doubt this regime's days are numbered. It could have been toppled in the streets had the bureaucrats of the CP and the CGI so desired. But that is not the nub of the question. The real question is knowing what to put in the regime's place. If worse comes to worst, a popular front government could be substituted for the de Gaulle government through elections (just as Eyskens was replaced by Lelevre-spaak a lew months iter the 1961 strike). But the capitalist regime will never be overthrown by electoral or parliamentary means.
Now this overthrow, this taking of power, is objectively possible today. The reason it does not take place is that there is not yet a sufficiently influential, organized, unified vanguard, to the of the CP, that could lead the left masses to victory immediately.
Under these circumstances, the aim today must be to seize the greatest possible number of guarantees and key positions -- as insurance that this magnificent struggle isn't sold short for a paltry change of bourgeois governments and doesn't lead to a terrible disillusionment of the toiling masses -- a disillusionment that would open the way to a dictatorship whose ferocity, as in Greece, would be in proportion to the fear now shaking the bourgeoisie.
It is here that the strategy of inton detands, structual its alta "anticapitalist structural reforms
The masses cannot seize power in the factories and neighborhoods; that calls for a new and centralized revolutionary leadership that does not as yet exist. But the fact that the masses are not yet in ‹ position to seize power aoes not at 11 imply the impossibility oi winning, right now, demands over and above wage increases.
The workers hold the factories and nerve centers of the nation. These are powerful key positions that cannot, given the present relationship oi Iorces, snatched from them. They must immediately establish a de facto power that the bosses and the state cannot cancel out once "calm" has been restored, regardless of whether the elections or the referendum take place, or whether a "leftist" government replaces the "rightist" government.
This de facto power consists in democratically elected committees which establish workers control over all production; which regulate hiring and firing; which forbid all factory shutdowns; which open the company books; which eliminate secrecy in banking; which bare all the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation; which calculate and expose the real rate of profit; which uncover hidden profits or profits camouflaged as "amortization," in-
"overhead" or as vestments camouflaged as "repairs and maintenance."
These committees should decide which enterprises would begin operating again, and to what end —- that is, exclusively fill the needs of the working population. They should have veto power over every investment project. They should join together locally, regionally and nationally, in conthat will begin to construct a plan gresses of economic development for socialist France, along consumer lines very different from those of neocapitalism.
These committees should establish picket lines and armed workers defense guards against the violence of the CRS and Of the fascist bands of the "Occident," which must be systematically exposed and broken up.
It is thus that dual power will be born -- an inevitable step toward a socialist France in the present situation, in view of the inadequacy of the revolutionary leadership in the present stage.
Thursday evening [May 23] the workers who set type for the reactionary paper Le Parisien Libéré refused to permit a mendacious headline to appear. This headline made exaggerated claims about a large back-towork movement. It was a deliberate effort to demoralize and to mislead, and the workers refused to execute it. There we have a concrete beginning of workers control!
Tomorrow these same workers should open the doors of all the big bourgeois printing plants, so that all revolutionary tendencies may print their papers and their pamphlets and thus finally get opportunities equal to those of the big capitalists to spread their ideas on a large scale. There we have the embryo of socialist democracy!
It is because neocapitalism has made these needs for fairness, justice, equality, liberty still sharper than in the period when the workers of the West were crushed by hunger; it is because neocapitalism is totally powerless to satisiy these elementary needs of the student and worker masses -- administration of the factories and universities by those who work in them, by the abolition of all privileges of wealth and academic standing; it is beonly by the cause these needs can be met expropriation of the bourgeoisie, that the bankruptcy of neocapitalism, which accounts for the explosions of 1960-61 in Belgium, of 1965 in Greece, and of May 1968 in France, leads inexorably toward the socialist revolution.
Notes
* We analyzed in detail the reasons peri-