(The following article has been translated from the March 23 issue of Rouge, the weekly organ of the Ligue Communiste (Communist League), the French section of the Fourth International.]
In its January 16, 1970, issue Cause du Peuple (People's Cause] offered an important innovation. Up till that date the organ of the Gauche Prolétarienne [GP-Proletarian Left] had been content to publish a flood of more or less embellished accounts of "tough" workers' struggles. The conclusion emerging from this collection of stories was invariably the same: "You are right to revolt; you have to dare to struggle; and you have to fight anybody who doesn't have the nerve, especially the modern revisionists, those bourgeoisified accomplices of the regime."
Political analysis of the class relationships in France was limited to a few peremptory declarations. As for strategic orientation and tactical directives, there was nothing at all. The content of Cause du Peuple was strictly limited to exalting rebellion and exhorting to rebellion as an end in itself.
It seems that the leadership of the Gauche Prolétarienne itself finally came to find this content a bit light. In No. 15 of its journal, it inaugurated a new column entitled "Organize."
In this column it promised to explain its political line to the workers "in various ways but very completely." This is the line of the "new resistance" and the "new partisans."
Since this line was formulated and put into practice, it has exercised a strong attraction on all the Maoist groups. L'Humanité Rouge has been the Maoist current most affected. Today HR is literally being torn to shreds. A not inconsiderable part of its activists have already been won over to the Gauche Prolétarienne, especially in the student sector.
But other Maoist tendencies and local groupings like "Vive la Révolution" [Long Live the Revolution] in Nanterre, or informal groupings of the Mao-spontanéist current, are feeling the pressure acutely.
There is nothing mysterious about this. Whatever their specific features, all the Maoist groups unconditionally accept the orthodoxy recorded in the Little Red Book and brought up to date every week in Pékin-Information the French equivalent of the Peking Review].
These groups have in common a certain number of theses or precepts capitalism is tottering; the masses are overflowing with enthusiasm for socialism and revolution; the PCF (Parti Communiste Français — French Communist party, is a social-fascist party that must be combated as such; the unions are the best agents of the bourgeoisie, and so forth.
The orientation of the Gauche Prolé- tarienne best expresses the premises common to all the Maoist groups. It is by no means astonishing then that the GP is serving as a pole of attraction for the Maoist current as a whole in France and accumulating its activists.
The Gauche Prolétarienne originated in the split of the Union des Jeunesses Communistes
Marxistes-Léninistes
[Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth]. The UJCML did not survive the test of May 1968. It shared with the ex-FER (Fédération des Etudiants Révolutionnaires — Federation of Revolutionary Students, an ultraleft sectarian grouping allied with the Socialist Labour League in England] the unhappy privilege of having opposed by every available means the May 6-13 test of strength between the student movement and the regime.
Denouncing the "adventurism" of the JCR (Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire - Revolutionary Communist Youth, from which the Communist League evolved] and the March 22 Movement, which it said "were sending students in to be butchered," the UJCML repudiated confrontations with the forces of order and did not participate in the night of the barricades May 10. The political bankruptey revealed by this decision had violent repercussions internally.
In September 1968 the UJCML split into multiple tendencies. A part of its cells joined the l'Humanité Rouge circles. Theorizing that the failure of the UJCML was the failure of all organizational structures, another fragment of this organization became the backbone of the Mao-spontanéist current, which was then in full flower. Many members adopted a wait-andsee attitude and formed local groups. A part of the organization, finally, continued to follow the old leadership.
Although the leaders of the UJCML accepted a very severe self-criticism, they intended to put an end to the general collapse and rebuild an organization. To this end they created their own tendency. A tiny minority, this formation was given the deprecatory name of the "black line" [the anarchist flag is black] or the "militarist line."
This "black line" tendency was the originator of the Gauche Prolétarienne. It owed its title of the "militarist tendency" to the fact that it took over (at that time still with a great deal of circumspection) the anarchist practice of violent action by an active minority aimed at shaking the masses out of their apathy. Overestimating the value of precision commando operations produced a tendency to pose political problems in military terms.
In October 1968 the "black line" published the first issue of the Cause du Peuple and became the Gauche Prolétarienne. The anarchist character of the GP became clearly accentuated a few months later when it accepted the remnants of the March 22 Movement into its ranks (December 1968). The anarchist theme of antiauthoritarian rebellion became the central theme of the organization. For the editors of the Cause du Peuple the principal con. tradiction was not fundamentally b tween the exploiters and the exploited but between the leaders and the led.
All persons holding positions of authority (professors, technicians, "petty bosses," etc.) were classified as agents of the bourgeoisie pure and simple, that is, as full-fledged class enemies.
stematically the anarchist core of me March 22 Movement took over Maoism as the theory of a libertarian revolution (the cultural revolution being the prototype of antiauthoritarian revolution).
Thus, a bold synthesis was accomplished between the thought of Chairman Mao (freely interpreted) and the old libertarian substratum of a part of the student movement. A new product was added to the handbook of political alchemy - anarcho-Maoism, or the anarchism of the age of cultural revolution.
It is impossible to understand anything about the practice of the Gauche Prolétarienne (its faith in the propaganda of the deed, its mystique of exemplary actions, its fetishism of violence, its lack of political analysis, its scant concern with strategic and tactical problems, its spite against the traditional workers movement, and even its written and spoken style imitating Pere Duchene) unless you keep in mind the dominance of anarchist tradition over this organization.
The line developed by the Gauche Prolétarienne can be summed up easily. It is based on one implicit postulate. Since May 1968 France has been passing through a revolutionary situation. The revolutionary crisis of May did not go all the way because of the betrayals of the social fascists. But the general strike opened up a revolutionary situation which is continuing. Today the people are systematically utilizing revolutionary violence to impose their will or to break the repression.
"Everywhere among the people, the workers are violating the work tempos, blocking production, kidnapping the bosses. The peasants are breaking into the prefectures and dragging the prefects or the ministers to their farms. One slogan is rallying all the oppressed popular strata - kidnap the tyrannical bosses, the corrupt funetionaries, the profiteers! Give them blow for blow!" (Cause du Peuple, No. 14.)
Facing this revolutionary offensive the masses, the vanguard groups Must assume their responsibilities. Makeshift politics is finished. It is no May 4, 1970
longer time for slow and routine propaganda and organizational work. The situation requires new forms of preinsurrectional action. "This is the time for partisans."
"We say to the bosses that we are at war but since you have planted cops on every corner, since you are militarily occupying our cities, we are waging partisan struggles against you. Your moronic cops can't do a thing against the shadowy fighters. In Dunkirk a young worker is killed, two port cranes are immobilized by an act of sabotage - that will give the murderers something to think about. In Hénin-Liétard after the murder of sixteen miners, a fire breaks out in the reconversion offices of the mines -that threw such a scare into the murderers that their whole corrupt press did not say a word about it. In Nice the Brevex workers burn a boss's villa and his car - that is a warning to the murderers of the days to come when blood will cry out for blood." (Cause du Peuple, No. 17.)
Today the "new resistance" is the dividing line between the opportunist traitors and revolutionists. Thosewho, in these revolutionary circumstances, refuse to encourage popular resistance, fear to move on to a qualitatively higher level of struggle, and take ref uge in the hustle and bustle of routine political campaigns (i.e., the Ligue Communiste, Lutte Ouvrière, the PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifié - United Socialist partyl, HR, etc.) are "liquidators."
Those who try to win ridiculously small gains by a policy of pressuring the bosses, when the popular resistance wants everything (i.e., the PCF, the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail - General Confederation of Labor, the CP-controlled union], and unions in general) are "collaborators," agents of the class enemy among the people.
"A corrupt element is dividing us, liquidating our hatred and our faith in victory-unionism. The unions are the best agents among us of the occupying power." (Cause du Peuple, No. 15.)
In short, the existence of a revolutionary situation characterized by a general offensive of the masses authorizes the French Maoists to begin people's war. At the present stage this war can only be embryonic (sabotage, punitive expeditions, commando actions). But let no one mistake it - this is already a war of liberation. The occupying power is the bourgeoisie; the collabos are the social fascists; the new partisans are the Maoists of the Gauche Prolétarienne.
"We will call the people in Massy as everywhere in France to insurrection to destroy the power of the occupiers. Our present partisan work is preparing the way for these uprisings and the war of liberation." (Cause du Peuple, No. 15.)
I have given a long description of the orientation of the Gauche Prolé- tarienne in order to show clearly the object of our criticism. In these polemics the Maoist comrades claim to believe that there is a simple opposition of two kinds of leftism. On the one side there is supposed to be a scrappy, violent, authentic left; on the other the prudent, legal, timid left.
The second kind of leftism is supposedly perishing from the shame of having started out linked with the former and seeking on every occasion to bury the memory of its unfortunate lineage by invectives and press communiqués. This cleaned-up leftism, they intimate, rejects all recourse to violence out of fear of having its papers, its pamphlets, and its meetings banned. Arguing on the basis of a pretended unfavorable relationship of forces, it is supposedly sticking strictly to the area of bourgeois legality.
In reality, this view of things does not stand up. The UJCMI and the FER prudently opposed the street battles of May 1968. That did not prevent the minister of the interior from banning them in one fell swoop. It is not the resorting to violence that we criticize in the orientation of the Gauche Prolétarienne; it is this orientation itself.
Because violent action is not a value in itself. It is a means to serve a strategy or a tactic. If the strategy is incorrect,
, the violent or legal actions by which it is implemented likewise become political errors to betaken advantage of by the enemy. It may be a very good thing to deflate a foreman, an informer, or even a union tyrant. Everything depends on the "way you go about it," that is, the political framework within which you proceed.
Thus, the object of our criticism is not the "violence" of the GP but the political line behind this violence which, in turn, gives the GP's "violent actions" their style and political meaning.
Seeing the present situation as a prerevolutionary one in which the masses are on the offensive all up and down the line reveals a singular capacity for self-hypnosis. In fact, the theoreticians of the GP proceed by extrapolations. Breton peasants kidnap Ollivier Guichard and the prefect accompanying him? Without batting an eye the Cause du Peuple concludes: "The peasants are breaking into all prefectures and dragging all prefects and all ministers to their farms!"
During a strike, workers kidnap the bosses and the supervisory personnel? The Cause du Peuple immediately concludes, "Let's kidnap the tyrannical bosses, the corrupt functionaries, and the profiteers! This is the slogan that is rallying all the oppressed popular strata!'
In reality the political situation is characterized in one respect by a great combativity on the part of the masses. The working class is by no means disposed to permit a deterioration of its living standards and job conditions. It has taken over the new forms of struggle propagated in May by the student movement. This continuing struggle has proved contagious; it is spreading to the small peasants and the small merchants.
But on the other hand, the workers more than ever lack a political perspective. Every worker feels that to get any real change they will have to attack the regime. But none see a socialist alternative. In May 1968 the bankruptcy of the traditional labor movement deprived 10,000,000 strikers of any political perspective. The situation has not changed to this day. Moreover, the workers are not ready to unleash an unlimited strike every two years to win a 10 percent raise inevitably eroded by devaluation.
Hard economic struggles can be anticipated in various sectors of industry. But we should not expect generalized movements to pose the question of power. For still stronger reasons, we should not expect mass movements of an insurrectional type.
May 1968 opened up a period of instability for French capitalism. The relationship of forces between the classes has stabilized at a level barely tolerable for the bourgeoisie. Taking advantage of the passivity of thework- 402
ers parties, the bourgeoisie has regained the initiative and is striving to restore an equilibrium.
On the political front, the bourgeoisie has reestablished its unity, readjusting its historic ambitions at the expense of General de Gaulle's career. On the social front the regime is trying to co-opt the unions by enticing them with contracts providing for progressive wage increases. It is pursuing its plan of regimenting the youth by its reform of national service, the restoration of the old moral order in the high schools, the faculties, etc. Simultaneously the regime is using unprecedented repressive means.
Since the devaluation, the Gaullist- Centrist regime has scored some points. The mass struggles everywhere are essentially of a defensive type.
For the leaders of the Gauche Prolétarienne "the slightest spark can start a prairie fire." So they are trying to blow every spot that looks like it is warming up into a hot coal. In this view, the essential function of violent action lies in its revelatory, stimulating, exemplary character. The circumstances and the stakes of a confrontation matter little in the last analysis, as long as the cops, or the "petty bosses," get a drubbing in front of the workers.
Since the stakes of the confrontation are secondary to the symbolic value of the action itself, little by little we see a fetishizing of confrontation, confrontation on all occasions and for its own sake.
In a truly prerevolutionary period the multiplication of violent clashes can galvanize the combativity of the masses and precipitate a generalization of the struggles. However, in the present situation "exemplary actions" have no chance of getting the masses to follow. The mentality of the workers faithfully reflects the fluctuations in the relationship of forces. A courageous example by the students is not what the workers need to engage in a general struggle. Once again, what they need are clear perspectives.
The exemplary virtue of violent actions is proving of dubious effectiveness and the Maoist activists are finding themselves forced to substitute their own violence for the violence of the masses. It is not the workers who are taking up revolutionary violence to solve their problems; it is the activists of the Gauche Prolétarienne who are exercising revolutionary violence in the name and in place of the masses.
In Marxist theory this policy has a name- putschism. Putschist practin has the effect of isolating revolutiona groups and exposing them to repression. In a period of a fluctuating relationship of forces and a vigorous political offensive by reaction, putschists not only endanger the revolutionary movement as a whole-which they help to isolate and discredit — but also the masses where they operate. Putschists expose those workers they do manage to organize to considerable risks of repression without being able to defend them.
The concrete results of putschism in Germany, Italy, and Japan have been massive sentencing of hundreds of activists, a weakened and decapitated student and revolutionary movement. The result has been a crisis of confidence among the working masses called on to engage in adventurist actions and then abandoned to repression.
There is no doubt that the results will be the same in France if the putschism of the Gauche Prolétarienne is not politically defeated. Winning this battle is not the least important task of the front of revolutionary and progressive organizations for which the foundation was laid March 6 in Nanterre.
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At San Francisco Panel
Fifty Scholars Discuss 'Trotskyism in Asia'
San Francisco
Some fifty scholars took part in a panel discussion on "Trotskyism in Asia" here on April 3 as part of a conference of the Association for Asian Studies [AAS].* The panel was organized and chaired by Professor Richard Kagan of Boston State College, a national coordinator of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, an antiwar group formed in 1967 after the refusal of the AAS to take a position against U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
A number of papers were presented for discussion. Daniel Hemery of the Sorbonne presented a research work on "Trotskyism in Vietnam, 1929-39." Hemery is an assistant to Jean Chesneaux, a leading sinologist who left the French Communist party along with a number of other intellectuals, because of the party's reaction to the May-June 1968 events in France.
George Lerski of the University of San Francisco, the author of Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon, spoke on the more recent history of Ceylonese Trotskyism.
Prof. Kagan presented a paper on Chinese Trotskyism from 1928-32.
Other speakers included Theodore Edwards of the Socialist Workers party, the American Trotskyist organization; George Fischer, indexer of the Trotsky archives at Harvard University; and Warren Lerner of Duke University, who has made a study of Karl
* This conference was "infiltrated" by the Academic Advisory Committee for Thailand [AACT], a subsidiary of the Agency for International Development [AID] of the U.S. government. The April 2 issue of the Student Mobilizer, published by the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, carried an expose of U.S. counterinsurgency projects in Thailand [see Intercontinental Press, April 13, page 315], including documentation on AACT's plans to use this conference to pump other scholars for information that might aid the Pentagon in propping up the military dictatorship in Thailand.
Some 500 copies of the Student Mobilizer were sold at the AAS conference. The issue made quite an impact, especially ce all of the persons named in the expose as secretly working for the government were present with name tags on! May 4, 1970
Radek, the early Bolshevik and onetime Trotskyist executed by Stalin during the Moscow trials.
Kagan is writing a book on Chinese Trotskyism with special emphasis on Chen Tu-hsiu, the principal founder of the Chinese Communist party, who broke with Stalin in 1928 to join the International Left Opposition.
Kagan pointed to the rich cultural and Marxist legacy left by the early Chinese Trotskyists. He described their historical origins in Moscow and Shanghai, the influence of Radek and the Sun Yat-sen University, the emergence of four separate Trotskyist groups that came together in a single organization in 1931, the arrests and trials of 1932, and the later period.
Kagan, who is fluent in Chinese and Japanese, has assembled a rare collection of the early documents, books, and pamphlets of the Chinese Trotskyists, a number of which were believed to have been lost-including an analysis of Chinese history by Radek which he discovered in a Chinese translation.
Daniel Hemery described the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, which was centered mainly in what is now South Vietnam. This was the largest colonial section of the Fourth International until the adherence of the Lanka Sama Samaja party of Ceylon. Hemery described the origins, mass roots and large following of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and their prolonged united front with the Stalinists- from 1931 to 1937—long after Trotskyists elsewhere had been ostracized from any common action with the parties of the Comintern. His treatment was sympathetic and eminently fair in describing the struggles led by the Vietnamese Trotskyists.
George Lerski, whose book goes only to the end of World War II, dealt mainly with the 1964 split in the LSSP. At that time the majority broke from the Fourth International to join the bourgeois Bandaranaike government, while a minority maintained the classstruggle principles of Trotskyism.
Lerski spoke highly of the political integrity and Marxist training of the various LSSP leaders whom he had met while teaching at the University of Ceylon. He suggested that machinations by the Stalinists and the Russian ambassador had possibly played a role in the 1964 defections from Trotskyism.
Theodore Edwards gave a Trotskyist evaluation of the events and movements described by the previous speakers. He pointed out that the Trotskyists in Vietnam and China worked under the most difficult conditions, without any substantial outside aid, attacked from all sides - by the imperialists and the Stalinists and by the Kuomintang - and that they remained steadfast in their dedication to the revolutionary movement and to the program of the Fourth International.
Edwards discussed the historical processes at work in the world today that confirm Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution - in the states that have overthrown capitalism as well as in the colonial sector. He cited the strengthening of the world Trotskyist movement in recent years as evidence of the viability of Trotsky's Marxism.
Edwards analyzed the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" in some detail, showing how plagiarized caricatures of Trotsky's call for an antibureaucratic political revolution have been adopted by both Moscow and Peking for demagogic or factional purposes.
The discussion that followed the presentations showed that the ideas and the history of Trotskyism have become a subject of serious research and study, particularly by a section of the new generation of radical scholars.
Panaghoulis in Hospital
Alekos Panaghoulis, condemned to death after attempting to assassinate Greek dietator George
Papadopoulos in August
1968, was hospitalized April 12, Agence France-Presse has reported. Panaghoulis was said to have suffered burns from a fire in his bedding.
Worldwide protest forced the junta to grant an indefinite stay of execution. But in May 1969 Panaghoulis's brother Stathis said that the young revolutionist had been tortured "to the brink of madness."