¡On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the French Communist party, the Paris daily Le Monde devoted three full pages to assessments of the organization born a half century ago out of the split with the Social Democracy at the Congress of Tours. These pages included articles by the Social Democratic leader Guy Mollet, Deputy General Secretary Georges Marchais of the Communist party, as well as students of the history of the French Stalinist movement. In an apparent nod to the increasingly important challenge to the French CP from young forces on its left, the special supplement also included an analysis of the role and perspectives of the Communist movement by Alain Krivine, the 1968 presidential candidate of the Ligue Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International). Our translation of Krivine's article follows.]
The French Communist party has very few points in common with the young French section of the Communist International that emerged from the Tours split. We need only reread a few of the celebrated twenty-one conditions for joining the Third International-for example, on the role of parliaments, internationalism, or working within the army-to realize that in its half-century of history the 40
Communist party has certainly changed.
The PCF [Parti Communiste Fran- çais - French Communist party] was created at the time of the triumphant October revolution, the revolution of Lenin and Trotsky. Its objective was to bring out of the great postwar upheaval a social revolution that, in the minds of the Bolsheviks, could only be an integral part of a world revolution. But this party, in Brezhnev's time, has become a national party, a champion of national independence. For years it has been fighting "responsibly" for a democratic France in the framework of peaceful coexistence.
Holding a position of dominance in the workers movement, the PCF plays a considerable role in the country's political and social life. This role has a certain consistency to it if you look at the different attitudes the party has adopted during the great social crises that have marked contemporary France. In 1936 the PCF maintained that you had to "know when to end a strike." In 1945 we had to rebuild the national economy and have "only one police force and one army," strikes being considered a "weapon of the trusts." In 1968 what the party considered necessary was to "avoid adventures" after the Grenelle agreement.* And for this reason it ran the headline in l'Humanité: "The Bosses and the Government Are Prolonging the Strike"! Thus on three occasions the PCF leadership has used its power to maintain the existing social order.
It has become a commonplace on the far left to say that the PCF is no longer a revolutionary party. But too often verbal one-upmanship in denouncing the "social fascists" or "collaborators" takes the place of analysis. For us, designating the PCF as Stalinist describes at once its political strategy, the interests underlying it, and the party's organizational functioning.
The PCF's policy is clearly defined. Its objective is, by means of multiclass alliances, to coalesce the broadest possible layers of the population against a common enemy. In succession, the PCF leadership has advocated unity against fascism, against the 200 families, against the "Krauts," the trusts, personal power [of de Gaulle], and the monopolies. It has done this in the framework of popular, French, national, republican, and other fronts. The political formulas have been variations on the theme of surge in France, the government and the employers offered concessions to strengthen the hand of the reformist labor leaders, primarily the heads of the CP-controlled CGT [Confederation Generale du Travail -General Confederation of Labor], so that they could get the 9,000,000 strikers back to work. - IP
true, renewed, or advanced democ- тасу.
In this type of combination, strikes may serve as a means of pressure but the goal is to catch votes. In this 'onception, identification with the USSR remains indispensable. Next, this strategy requires assembling several preconditions.
First of all, this line requires the existence of a parliamentary system sufficiently democratic to permit an effective policy of pressure. Secondly, it demands the existence of a Social Democratic or "republican" intermediary that accepts playing the role of partner. Finally, it depends on a foreign and domestic policy by the USSR sufficiently attractive to win support and to serve as a model. The progressive disappearance of these three prerequisites and the appearance of the new phenomenon of radicalization of the social struggle are provoking a real crisis in the PCF today.
In view of the disappearance of classical parliamentary democracy and the establishment in 1958 of a "strong state," the program of "advanced democracy" is losing its impact. Gradual limitation of the power of the monopolies, democratization of the ORTF [Office de Radiodiffusion et Télévision Française — French Radio and Television Broadcasting Organization], the police and the army, along with extending the nationalizations, might seem attractive if, under the pressure of a landslide vote for the united left, the bourgeoisie were capable of accepting such reforms.
Unfortunately for this strategy, it is evident that the monopolies running the country are not a structure separable from the overall political and economic complex of the existing system. Quite the contrary, the monopolies breathe life into the entire mechanism of development. They form a network pervading the bourgeois social fabric. They are the nervous system of bourgeois society. Coups d'etat have become an accepted part of life, as well as arresting communists in their beds at the crack of dawn.
But the PCF's "gradualist" strategy has been put in question all the more by the slow disappearance since 1958 of structures such as local assemblies, parliament, etc., mediating between the state and the wage earners. This preents putting pressure on these bodies With the aim of devitalizing class conflicts. Now, to make themselves heard January 18, 1971
by the central government, the workers are forced to use more radical forms of struggle not encompassed by
ALAIN KRIVINE
the legality instituted by the leaderships of the workers organizations.
As for the perspective of uniting the left, which the PCF has sought to realize in relation to currents with no following in the plants or anywhere else except at the polls, the party's successes reflect only the febrile enthusiasms of the electoral game. May 1968 blew up this orientation.
But another obstacle for the PCF leadership is developing out of the prolonged death agony of its favored ally, the Socialist party. Despite the CP's continual efforts to preserve a measure of respectability for the Social Democracy against the storms of time, this party is suffering attrition and strangulation - to the great despair of the PCF leadership. These chiefs correctly fear that a new reformist formation, including François Mitterrand, would be more reluctant to play the infernal, ceaselessly renewed game of advanced democracy.
Finally, the last pillar of this strategy - the element that many militants regarded as the touchstone of orthodoxy, that is, the Soviet model - is today the source of difficulties and in uneasiness.
The revelations
Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Congress, the intervention in Czechoslovakia, the universal crisis of the Stalinist system - given new immediacy recently by the events in Poland - cannot help but be cause for disillusion.
Since 1968 a new relationship of forces has emerged in the workers movement. The development is now irreversible of a force to the left of the PCF which, while still organizationally divided, is rallying and influencing an entire generation that has come to political awareness recentiy outside the party channels. In all street demonstrations, the CP leadership is forced to accept a contingent of revolutionists, in Paris as well as in the provinces.
For some time it has been possible to organize full-scale national campaigns outside the PCF framework (the Comité National Vietnam [National Vietnam Committee], the campaigns in transport, in the army, for nondiscriminatory wage increases, the Secours Rouge [Red Aid, a united front to oppose repression]).
While still in a minority, the far left organizations like the Ligue Communiste have gone beyond the stage of mere propaganda. Today they
• are moving into the stage of organizing struggles — with all the exemplary impact this can have on Communist activists, especially the youth, or, to the contrary, some older militants, who after repeated unhappy experiences no longer feel at home in their party.
In the present period of radicalization of struggles, the PCF faces a complex and contradictory situation. Retaining its hegemony over the working class as a whole, it is cutting itself off from the most combativestrata. More than in the past, it is recruiting in petty-bourgeois left circles attracted by its consistent and "reasonable" positions, as well as in certain layers of the working class becoming politically conscious for the first time. At the same time, because of its entire history, its education, and its way of operating, this party is unsalvageable and can only move in the direction of more consistent reformism.
Already I can see some CPers accusing me again of anti-Communism. Let's get this straight. The real anti- Communists are those who oppose building socialism in France. And in this sense, our criticisms have nothing in common with those of Bergeron, Mitterrand, or Savary.
Fifty years after the Congress of Tours, the task of the Fourth Internationalists is clear. In France and throughout the world, we must make every effort to rebuild real communist parties.
Notes
* In the Rue de Grenelle negotiations during the May-June 1968 revolutionary up-