THE MAY EVENIS AND THE QUESTION OF POWER IN FRANCE
By Livio Maitan
If we cannot speak of real dual power in this situation - at least at this writing - it is only because there is no united and coordinated counterpower on the regional and national scale. However, the official administration is largely neutralized, and scattered centers of counterpower exist which objectively converge in the opposition to and the assault on the regime.
(2) The ruling class is perfectly aware of the extreme gravity of the situation for it. However, given the relationship of forces, it cannot easily adopt a consistent line of conduct. The alternative of repression -- which at the present stage of the movement would have to be massive and highly violent to get real results -- appears too risky and does not seem likely in the short run. Most of the ruling class seem to have opted for a tactic of winning time in the hope that the movement will enter a phase of decline and begin to show signs of diminishing. And, of course, it is not excluded that important concessions have already been made or projected. The Gaullist referendum maneuver fits into such a scheme. However, things have gone so far that a simple conservative delaying tactic is not sufficient. The bourgeoisie will probably be obliged not only to make important economic concessions but also to accept major political changes.
After all the possible combinations and variants, an alternative solution will be prepared or tried which could lead to the entry into the government of the FGDS [Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste -- Federation of the Democratic. Socialist Leftl and even of the Communist party.
The international economic problems and the chain-reaction repercussions of the French developments are unquestionably obstacles to economic concessions; and the bourgeoisie's lack of a solidly organized party of its own is an added impediment to their accepting the CP into the sphere of government. But if the situation maintains its present tension and if the danger of a complete collapse of the regime grows, the ruling class will prefer to make big concessions and run great risks rather than lose everything irremediably.
(3) At the point the upsurge has reached there can be no further step forward for the working class but the overthrow of the Gaullist regime by direct revolutionary action. Any policy which does not pose this objective, in whatever forms it may be presented and whatever declarations accompany it, can only give the enemy a breathing spell, give him an opportunity for a salvaging operation, and thus lead to a gradual decline in the movement. It is certainly quite probable that, whatever course events take, the working class will make economic and political gains on a reformist level. But the problem now posed is not whether reforms are possible or to what extent but whether the question of power is on the order of the day.
An analysis of this situation -- which is characterized by an enormously favorable relationship of forces and the high level of consciousness attained by the worker and student masses -- demands a definite affirmative answer. The strategic objective of the revolutionary movement which began May 3 can and must be the overthrow of the Gaullist regime and the capitalist system. It is hard to say, especially from a distance, whether the overthrow of Gaullism and the overthrow of bourgeois power will immediately coincide, or whether the removal of de Gaulle could constitute an initial stage to be followed more or less closely by a settling of accounts with Gaullism's bourgeois and Menshevik heirs. However, the basic process is clear, and it is with such a revolutionary perspective that one must act. More precisely, it is in the interest of the working class to reject everything that tends to moderate or contain the crisis, and to develop its own organs of dual power.
The essential objective in these days must be the constitution in the factories, the places of work, the universities, the villages, in the neighborhoods, etc., of revolutionary committees. Ihese committees must be democratically elected at the grass-roots level and permanently subject to recall. They must federate and unify on the local and national scale. Any resistance arising from a cult of spontaneity must be resolutely combated. The spontaneous movement has produced all that it can -- and it has made an enormous contribution. But now the problem is to provide the movement with general unified organization and leadership instruments. If this is not accomplished, this necessary and indispensable function will be taken over by the traditional bodies and apparatuses which exist, naturally to the detriment of the revolutionary masses. What is called for here, therefore, is not the discussion of abstract ideological models -- or warnings against all the dangers that even the most democratic delegated assemblies hold -- but concrete, swift and decisive choices without waiting for definitive formulations. The initial experiences of the action committees created by the students in the universities and in the Latin Quarter seem to offer a first concrete indication in this regard.
It must be added that to the extent that a revolutionary countergovernment is organized it will be able to begin taking on the elementary tasks in the organization of day-to-day life, which become increasingly pressing as the country's paralysis continues. This would be an initial way of getting the people "used" to the idea and practice of workers power.
(4) The great dramatic battle in progress is not only between the ruling class and the working class but also between the revolutionary forces and political and trade-union bureaucracies which are a parasitic growth on the workers movement. This is another essential aspect of the French events, and in this particular phase, the decisive one.
Ihe great revolutionary movement began with big student mobilizations which were initially sharply opposed and vilely denigrated by the bureaucrats, and the CP and CGI bureaucrats most of all. It is an established historical fact, no matter how these events develop, that without the student movement, and thus without the persistent and courageous preparatory work of the "grouplets" (including in the forefront the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire [Revolutionary Comnunist Jouth], which has a well-defined revolutionary
Marxist orientation), the
French revolutionary May would never have happened.
And it is now no less clear that young workers taking an initiative completely independent of -- and objectively antagonistic to -- the logic and interests of the apparatuses played a decisive part in key plants in the unfolding of the impetuous movement of strikes and factory occupations, which surprised the bureaucratized parties and trade unions no less than the capitalists.
But after a certain point, the traditional parties and unions and above all, given their weight, the CP and the CGI gained entry into the movement, seeking to take it over. Io a certain extent they succeeded.
The all-too-evident aim of the bureaucracy of the workers organizations has been to contain and "moderate" the movement by diverting it from the open sea of revolutionary struggle onto the shoals of reformist parliamentarianism. With a carefully articulated scale of the CGT has been endeavoring to tasks, keep the workers' objectives on the level of economic demands.
Meanwhile, the CP has done everything possible to incorporate the whole movement into its perspective of entering the bourgeois state, even at the cabinet level -- by preference, on the basis of a neopopular front formula. All the bureaucracies' partial demagogic left turns and all their shameless maneuvers of adapting or pretending to adapt to the pressures of the rank and file have not and will not change the substance of their policy. The bureaucracies reject the revolutionary perspective. They do not want the overthrow of capitalism through direct action. They look to a reestablishment of the bourgeois-democratic system accompanied by economic concessions to the masses and an increase in their own specific weight and their direct participation in the state apparatus.
In a situation in which the bourgeois state has been convulsed by an unprecedented crisis and has lost all support, in which the ruling class does not even command a political party worthy of the name, in which even the petty-bourgeoisie is radicalized, the last hope of conservatism has come to rely on the activity of the bureaucracies of the workingclass organizations to block and divert the revolutionary movement. Ihe mechanism is so transparent and the stakes so decisive that this emerges clearly even from the press organs of the French and international bourgeoisies themselves. They no longer conceal their desperate hope that the CP and CGI will be successful.
Even a simple listing of the misdeeds of the Séguys and Waldeck-Rochets would be too lengthy. It is enough to note the slanders against the student movement and against the revolutionary the massive exertion elements in general, to prevent collaboration between the workers and students, the denial of solidarity to Cohn-Bendit, a victim of repression, the denunciation of the mass demonstrations as "provocative," the call for a boycott of the May 27 mass demonstration, and the attempt to force the miserable compromise of the morning of the same day on the masses. It is enough to note this to give an idea of the degradation proper to these bureaucrats who are terrified that a mighty revolutionary upsurge will also upset their positions of power and privilege.
The action of the young workers who took the initiative in the factory occupations, the ever broader participation of workers in common demonstrations with the students, the courageous opposinational CGI leaders, tion of local and and finally the clamorous rejection of the capitulationist Séguy by the union assemblies in the major French factories are all extremely important signs that the struggle between the bureaucrats and the revolutionary masses is not yet decided. Of course, in the last analysis, the bureaucrats still have considerable resources at their command, and they will certainly not hesitate cynically to avail themselves of support from the bourgeoisie and of the repressive apparatus itself.
Moreover, the likelihood that they can succeed in their game is all the greater because the mass movement is critically handicapped by the lack of a revolutionary leadership able to unify it politically and lead it to victory, to the seizure of power. In other words, the absence of a revolutionary party threatens once more to be the decisive negative factor. But the fact remains that conscious revolutionary forces have been maturing in these days on a vastly greater scale than in the past and that a basic clarification is taking place in deeper strata of the proletariat. Whatever the immediate outcome of this fluid situation, a new phase has opened up in the crisis of the bureaucracy; and the hysterical articles of the Pravda and Izvestia reactionaries supporting their Parisian cohorts cannot hide it.
(5) The historical importance of the revolutionary events in France needs no demonstration. They represent an extraordinary experience which will enable the revolutionary movement to draw a whole series of lessons and general conclusions. Here and now we can discern the following general points, among others.
The French May has passed a summary and final judgment on all the theories or pseudotheories about the cooption of the working class in the most advanced capitalist countries and its exhaustion as a motor force of revolution. Arguments adopted with varying degrees of seriousness by men like Marcuse, Sweezy, or Mallet -- not to mention many others -- have been swept away irrevocably.
Socialist revolution by the working class, the class which is intrinsically antagonistic to the system, is back on the agenda. It is back on the agenda even in the countries where this advanced capitalism exists which was supposed to relegate the basic criteria and concepts of Marxism and Leninism to the junk heap. And experience indeed has shown that in these countries, in the present phase of the world crisis of imperialisn, an explosive revolutionary crisis can break out almost without warning, due to the convergence of a whole series of domes- țic and international factors, the differing weights of which must be evaluated with updated criteria.
A new social and political force
Striking students in Huaraz, the capital of the Ancash district, attempted o seize the Justice Department and Provincial Council building in that city on May 16, while other students blocked access to the city with rock barricades.
This battle was one in a series in hich students and local people, demontrating to force the government to build
STUDENTS BATTLE POLICE IN PERU STUDENTS BATTLE POLICE IN PERU
has come into play -- the broad student masses -- which is capable of playing an anticapitalist role, of developing a high level of revolutionary consciousness, and, under certain conditions, of being a driving force in revolutionary movements. In certain cases, vanguard student elements can play a prime role in exposing the reactionary function of the bureaucracy.
Once again it has been seen that petty-bourgeois can be drawn into revolutionary struggle for socialism, not by parliamentary maneuvers or moderate "democratic" formulations but by direct revolutionary action. And thus moreover the historic truth that the opportunists regularly ignore will be confirmed: that reforms are gained primarily as a byproduct of revolutionary mobilizations.
Certain tendencies and theories widespread in substantial sectors of the revolutionary movement, which, basing themselves on spontaneity, seek to deny the irreplaceable role of the revolutionary party by means of arbitrary analogies and misinterpretation of certain experiences, emerged seriously compromised from the test of the French events. While spontaneous action is indispensable to break up incrustations and sclerosis, the final solution -- seizure of power -- is not possible without a revolutionary leadership which can create political
Leninist type.
unity, that is, without a party of the
The French crisis has aroused and gripped even the most abstruse and inert strata ol the society; it nas touched off a release of intellectual energies the significance of which can still scarcely be comprehended. It is, nowever, doubtlessly laying the basis for a great leap forward in revolutionary culture.
Marxism, liberated from the sterile schema of bureaucratic deformation, will come to express its inexhaustible creative potential at every level of science and contemporary culture.
a technical university in the area, clashed with police. These clashes, reported by Prensa Latina, extended over the period May 15-17.
One person was killed and fiftysix injured, including four police, in the escalating struggle which led the regime to formally suspend all constitutional rights in the region on May 17.