THE IMMEDIATE TASKS FACING THE REVOLUTIONISTS IN FRANCE
By Alain Krivine had the gall to justify this act.
The PCD said that it "condemns the use of troops and force to settle differences among socialist states and as a means of settling disputes among Communist parties over the methods to be employed in building socialism."
indignation of Baumel.
This campaign has a purpose -- to
Climate at all race repeat against the conspirators. Because the bourgeoisie was afraid in May, it felt its power tottering. Before May, it was unaware of the vanguard groups or it underestimated them. Now it overestimates them; it sees their hand in everything.
But from one standpoint, if it overestimates their present strength, it is not overestimating the potential danger they represent as a force which threatens the machinery of integration into bourgeois society and which rejects the parliamentary dialogue by which the bourgeois government and the bureaucracy communicate smoothly. For the bourgeoisie, repression is a rational need, which on this occasion has taken on a fury that is a measure of the fears, the humiliations, and the powerlessness it experienced in May.
Some are trying now to distinguist
"tendencies" in the government -- a libertendency represented by Edgar Faure and a "cop" tendency represented by Marcellin. * In fact, the policies of these two differ
. their assessment of the balance of only in forces. Edgar Faure understands that starting in with fists clenched could set off a resurgence of the student mobilization of May. Offering his hand first, he hopes that
"serious students,"
the reformists, or the who see "participation" [a demagogic Gaullist slogan pledging involvement of the students and workers in running the country] as a continuation of May, will take it. Once the "incorrigible wildmen" are isolated, Edgar-the-liberal will turn over the reins to Marcellin-the-club; it's a scientific division of labor.
As for us, while we try to exploit any margin for maneuver offered by divisions of this sort, we consider that all revolutionists worthy of the name are constantly menaced by bourgeois society because they are constantly in conflict with it. It is fine to take full advantage of periods of legality but there should be no illusions about their durability. They are truces, not a normal situation to get used to. This legality will last only as long as no one threatens the established order. The respectable left, including the CP, is trying to obliterate this lesson. But we must revive the consciousness of the temporary nature of this situation.
We prepare ourselves for repression but not by turning inward, by practicing an ostrich-like policy. Io the contrary, in opposition to the official repression of the police, vanguard militants must arouse mass responses, broadening the movement. In opposition to the progovernment repression of the secret police and the CDR's [Comités de Défense de la Republique -- Committees for the Defense of the Republic -- Gaullist and fascist bands] they must develop mass self-defense.
The economic situation of French capitalism will not be catastrophic in the coming months. The buying power inherited from May is stimulating demand. And since the capitalists took advantage of the aborted crisis to make their readjustments, a period of economic expansion is in the offing for the immediate future.
But the effect of price increases for such things as cigarettes, railway Iares, gas, electricity, iood can be out of proportion to their real economic importance. The workers went back to work in perplexity after May, disillusioned but not crushed. Naturally they are not ready for a general strike every two months. But they realize that the bourgeoisie is trying to take back what it had to concede through a speedup and price increases, and they feel swindled and cheated. Since the wage increases were proportionally larger for low-wage workers than for the well paid, there may be sharp struggles in sectors like chemicals or metals.
In this connection, the student movement's capacity to block the government's policy in the universities is important. Of course, I do not think that the student movement can play the role of letonator as it did in Mawho hope for a vanguard workers -- those "revolutionary resurgence" since the "republican resurgence" Waldeck Rochet called for in the elections did not come off -- will keep their eyes on the movement which was out in front in May, the student movement.
If the students accept Edgar
Faure's "participation," if instead of deepening the concessions they won in May they capitulate to the repression, that would be a blow to the movement as a a blow to the morale of the workwhole,
But if the students block the government's plans for the new school year, reject a return to the old order and preserve the spirit of May, that would give new hope to the movement as a whole.
The student movement's first task is to beat the government on the university front, and the success of this depends partly on us.
But the students must not stay on the campuses; they must explain the meaning of their struggle in the neighborhoods and the factories. They must show that the workers and students are in the fight together against "participation." They must resist all attempts to divert their struggle in order to isolate it. They must expose the other face of "participation. They must support and publicize all struggles opened up by the working class.
After May the students cannot any longer go out to fight alone; that would mean entrapping the movement in the same impotence. The first task of the moment to rally the existing workers vanguard, which appeared in May both inside and outside the unions and the CP. With the Czechoslovak crisis aggravating the postelection malaise in the CP, it is possible today through attractive slogans and a militant style to draw together the nucleus of a workers vanguard. The arena of this regroupment must be the Action Committees and the workers committees where the most conscious workers are coming in search of something different than a rehash of the CGT's [Confédération Générale du Travail] economic themes, where they hope to find political underpinnings for their activity.
Inis slow, patient, stubborn work is the fundamental task.
But parallel to this, we must counter all the attempts by the government, the reactionaries, and apolitical types to organize the youth in movements such as the Mouvements Universitaires pour la Réforme [University Reform Movements] and the Conseil Etudiant de France [Student Council of France] and the Union pour la Coordination des Etudiants en Médecine [Medical Students Coordinating Committeel. Against these attempts we must create a vast revolutionary movement of the university and high-school youth based
Action Antin Coent technite Cechnica
Nationale des Etudiants Francais -- French National Student Union], and the student Action Committees. The best guarantee against any danger of a fascist development is to organize the youth.
Io set long-term perspectives, it is also necessary to develop the means for carrying them through, for keeping them from being diverted, for imposing them by a favorable balance of forces. In order to achieve this, the vanguard must be strengthened, educated, and rid of its organizational opportunism and its pettybourgeois habits which are bound up as much with its field of work as its particular social origins. But these faults cannot be eliminated simply by willing it mentally. Only more varied social composition, increased recruitment in workingclass strata, and the diversification of areas of work can achieve this.
The goal this vanguard must set it- . self is to formulate transitional slogans, to bring the transitional program up to date. Such slogans were cruelly lacking in May. The only thing the militants knew how to do was repeat the list of CGT demands in a different order or to reaffirm their fidelity to socialism. While the Action Committees or factory strike committees created embryonic organs of
By Les
The third-party presidential campaign of Alabama racist George Wallace is
. sharp indicator of the deep political crisis affecting the capitalist two-party system in the United States.
One of the outcomes of the Republican and Democratic conventions was that neither party yielded to the immense anger among the American people over continuation of the Vietnam war. The two political machines closed ranks so tightly on this issue that not even the sector of the capitalist class that considered it an error in the first place to escalate the war, and a blunder of historic proportions to persist in it, was granted the concession of having one of the two parties run a "peace" candidate, even as vice-president.
The result was that the two parties, to a degree never before seen, now appear to tens of millions of Americans to be exactly what they are -- identical, and not representative of their interests or responsive to their feelings.
The choice of Nixon and Humphrey as the standard-bearers of the two major parties only personalizes in an almost perfect way for these tens of millions of Americans the image of the two identical parties, campaigning on two identical programs, neither of which touches any of the real problems that face the country.
When George Wallace shouts, dual power and broke down the old barrier between trade-union action and political action, the militants remained imprisoned in the framework inherited from the Social Democracy and Stalinism, going from the minimum program to the maximum program and vice versa, without hitting on transitional demands which would educate the masses and meet their aspirations.
The militants above all must not turn inward in the work of developing this transitional program. For the themes selected to have any value, the masses must identify with them, become imbued with them, make them theirs. Io accomplish this, the vanguard militants must set in motion a vast program of research into the concrete conditions of the exploitation of the workers, promote collective formulation of slogans, and urge that they be tested in practice. This work must be done so that at the next crisis, enriched by this preparatory work, the spontaneity of the masses will be on a still higher level than it was in May.
Evans
"There's not a dime's worth of difference between them!" he is touching a sensitive spot in the consciousness of millions of people. His demagogy has met with ominous success •
Wallace began as a sectional, racist, small-time politician in Alabama. When he became governor of the state in 1963 he began to consolidate a base of white Southern segregationists, with his eventual aim being to build a national movement. Today he commands the support of the racist South, the traditional rightwing groups and sectors, and most of the supporters of 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
Wallace differs from Goldwater in that he is more openly racist and, more significantly, is a skillful demagogue who consciously uses left-sounding phraseology to appeal to sectors of the lower middle cass and even toe working class.
Feeding on the widespread discontent with the system among white voters, and capitalizing on the absence of any mass working-class alternative on the left, Wallace has succeeded in becoming the first third-party Southern politician since the Civil War to create a national movement. The impact of this reactionary phenomenon is clear in every aspect of the general election campaign.
Notes
* Appointed Minister of the Interior on May 30.