France: how to defeat the ruling class!
Firefighters battle the CRS exposing class divide
The latest wave of strikes in France that has been building for at least two months threatens the Macron regime. Macron is facing a worsening economic crisis as France falls behind its main economic rivals, Germany, Russia and the US. It is in danger of further decline as an imperialist power if it does not extract more productivity or surplus-value from its workers. But each attack to increase the exploitation of the workers – against the 35-hour week, imposing the fuel tax and now raising the pension age – has met an increasing resistance from the unions and new social movements such as Yellow Vests. Clearly growing numbers of workers of all description, self-employed and exploited petty bourgeois, have the will and the capacity to refuse to pay for France’s capitalist crisis.
But has the crisis of the French ruling class created a workers’ movement sufficient to bring about a pre-revolutionary situation which poses the question of which class rules? We argue that the movement so far has failed to break decisively from the bureaucracy and the treacherous reformist parties, let alone create organs of independent workers power capable of staging an indefinite political general strike that poses the question of power. Despite the will and capacity to mount a general strike, workers organisations are still held back by the union bureaucracy, reformists and fake Trotskyist parties, and ultimately the absence of a revolutionary party and program capable of leading a political general strike to victory.
The Yellow Vests Social Movement
The Yellow Vests began as a spontaneous social movement against paying a new diesel tax that Macron imposed to fund France’s obligations to the Paris Climate Accord. It put the burden of the cost of climate change onto workers, self-employed and farmers, rather than the big capitalist polluters. Its spontaneity was dramatically expressed by protestors wearing the mandatory Yellow Vest kept in every car for any emergency.
The Yellow Vest program includes some democratic demands we certainly support, but most of the immediate demands are not transitional because they do not involve workers directly in fighting for them. For example the minimum wage begs the state to construct a poverty trap rather than motivating workers to get rid of the wage system. The program is a visionless list that assumes no fascist danger and no international collision between France, as part of the U.S.-led bloc, and the 21st century China-Russia imperialist bloc on the rise. Without a plan for taking power this program leaves the initiative in the hands of Capital. The question of class power is debased as that of ‘direct’ or ‘popular’ bourgeois democracy. They implicitly accept the bourgeois-parliamentary expropriation of the workers’ franchise, the dictatorship of Capital in the workplace and society at large, and the exploitation of the semi-colonies of the former French empire.
The Yellow Vests began, and survives, as a militant social movement as it was not under the influence of the reformist left parties and the top union bureaucrats. Most of the reformist and centrist left characterised it as a petty bourgeois populism inherently leaning towards the fascist right. As the Yellow Vests protests grew and were met by state forces causing many severe injuries, the class basis of the populism became clearer. Fascists were thrown out of demonstrations, and unelected petty bourgeois leaders stood up in place of “grass roots” democracy. The Yellow Vests list of demands became focused on popular citizen assemblies, a utopian petty bourgeois form of democracy, which of course Macron seized upon as a solution to get the movement off the streets. He failed, as the Yellow Vests are now joining in the strike movement kicked off by the pension “counter-reform” at which point they become part of the “balance of forces” much loved by reformist parties not least the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA – New Anti-capitalist Party), and subject to the same revolutionary criticism.
The New Anti-Capitalist Party
The influence of the reformists’ control over the labour movement is demonstrated by the NPA which has its roots in the reformist history of the post-WW2 Fourth International and is no longer associated with Trotskyism. It has some influence in the unions. It backs the RAJP and SNCF unions’ fight against Macron’s pension “counter-reform”. It reports that the January days of action drew increasing support and exhibited an “atmosphere of joy, combativeness and strong determination”. Further, hostility towards the “counter-reform” is growing as “two-thirds of the French people want the project withdrawn outright.” It argues on the one hand that “Macron has lost this political battle”, yet on the other that the mobilization of workers, social movements etc., have not created the “balance of forces sufficient to make Macron yield”. Yet all is not lost. There is a new realization of the disastrous consequences of the project awakening more resistance in the ports, energy, national railways, and Paris transport, that could alter that “balance of power”.
The language of reformism reeks of class compromise. Counter-reforms already imply reforms. There is no conception of the need to go beyond countering reforms to defend them. No mention of a general strike, only disparate sectorial actions culminating in a “national mobilization.” All the NPA has in mind in its program is forcing Macron to retract his attack on pensions. The growing balance forces as measured on the street will be no more than a bargaining chip to strengthen the hand of the labour bureaucracy in negotiations with ministers of state. So long as the revolutionary left does not actively contest the rule of the labour bureaucracy in government and the unions, the potential of the working class to mount a revolutionary defence of its interests will be stillborn.
The problem is that the crisis of revolutionary leadership means there is a vacancy for the position of a revolutionary party capable of fighting for a revolutionary program. We explain what we mean with the examples of the FLTI and GMI, each describing themselves as engaged in building a new international revolutionary leadership, yet demonstrate from opposing perspectives, centrist solutions to the workers struggle in France.
FLTI (International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction)
The FLTI[*] explains that the cause of the current crisis is France’s loss of competitiveness with Germany. It sees the crisis as a part of a wider European crisis and that the French workers are in the “vanguard” of the European class struggle. But there is no mention of the wider inter-imperialist struggle between the US and Russia which has an impact on the further decline and potential break up of Europe.
The FLTI critiques reformist currents like NPA who do not see the recent strike waves as a “mass political struggle” of “class against class”, “paralyzing the economy”, and so fail to recognise that “the working class has taken France over”, and have “imposed” an independent General Strike “on the bureaucracy” which “calls into question who rules the country”. The FLTI claims Macron has lost control of workers because they broke from the bureaucracy and took control of the strikes themselves. The symbolic occupation of the CFDT union headquarters, cutting the electricity, “demonstrated their power and […] that the government can be defeated.”
So far, the FLTI’s analysis could have been written by syndicalists. Its political demands to build factory committees; co-ordinations of all local, regional and national struggles; self-defense committees; dissolve the police and state forces; free all fighters; culminating in a National Coordination for an Independent, Revolutionary General Strike to bring down Macron and the Fifth Republic, to nationalize factories, refineries, ports, industry, and banks under workers control, are all demands raised by syndicalists. And these are fine demands, but they don’t follow through to the class fight for state power. Even if it were true that the FLTI’s description of events were as advanced as it claims, it would have a duty to raise the full Transitional Program for a Workers’ Government. And even if events are not as far along the revolutionary road as they claim, the party of revolution would still be obliged by history and the Marxist method to raise a transitional program for a workers’ state!
Instead it calls for a “new [Paris] Commune” in all of France, and doesn’t mention Marx’s critique of the commune and those of Lenin and Trotsky, or the lessons they directed at the anarchists, syndicalists and other currents, about the need for a Marxist party to organise the insurrection to smash the bourgeois state. The FLTI fails completely to raise the critical question of how the General Strike, while posing the question of power, can organise for the insurrection, take power and impose a Workers Government to plan for socialism in a workers’ state.
‘Internationalizing’ a General Strike in France to a Revolutionary General Strike of all Europe hardly makes the French struggle a “bastion” of the “European and “world” working class. If there is no program for the General Strike to succeed in France how can the EU General Strike bring down “Maastricht”? Nor can the question of power be solved in the French semi-colonies occupied by French troops. Instead of internationalism, the export of bourgeois syndicalism opens the road for counter-revolution.
We conclude that the FLTI poses the question of power in advance of the General Strike, but does not warn workers that a Political General Strike must end in revolution or counter-revolution. It does not challenge the trade union consciousness of workers, the populism that is rife in the social movements, nor the abstract idealism of youth, by putting forward a revolutionary program that spells out the need for political councils (soviets) and workers militias, and the split of the ranks from the officer corps, all of which are necessary for an insurrection and putting a Workers’ Government in power.
What takes the place of Macron if his government falls? What happens if the 5th Republic falls? Without the struggle for a Workers’ Government it will be the 6th Bourgeois Republic. Instead of challenging reformist consciousness with the Leninist Trotskyist program, the FLTI is sowing illusions that nationalization of bourgeois property is possible without the smashing of the state. The FLTI has no claim to call itself Leninist, Trotskyist or Internationalist. Moreover, without making the call for a new revolutionary international based on a Leninist/Trotskyist program, it is not even claiming to be a “fraction” of that future party.
GMI (International Marxist Group)
The GMI (French section of the Permanent Revolution Collective) analysis refutes the FLTI position that the workers have taken control of the unions in preparation for a General Strike. Moreover, the reformist left parties serve to “rescue” the union leaders. The GMI argues that the bureaucracy is still intact and there can be no successful preparation for a Political General Strike which does not involve the intervention in the unions of a revolutionary workers party which as yet “does not exist and must be built.” Partial and holding actions instead of mobilising resistance are designed to make workers’ pay for their pensions and lead to passivity and demoralization. The results of the ‘days of action’ are isolation and exhaustion of struggles. The GMI intervened in mass meetings to call for a General Strike to unite all the sectors including students and youth, but without success. The struggle is now in a downward phase because the rank and file did not win against the bureaucracy and the reformist political parties.
Unlike the FLTI which sees the workers in control of the unions, and a political general strike on the near horizon, the GMI sees its main task as building the revolutionary workers party that can intervene in the unions and lead the break with the bureaucracy. “All conscious workers, all revolutionary proletarian nuclei must unite in a single communist organization capable of facing union bureaucracies, determined to fight for class independence, class struggle, socialism.” Yet, its immediate perspective is to build for a “General Strike until withdrawal [of the pensions ‘reform’].” The need for a party is clear, but where is the Transitional Program to overcome the crisis of revolutionary leadership? What use is the revolutionary workers party that understands that the class struggle is raising spontaneous struggles to such a level that support for a Political General Strike is on the agenda, yet does not raise the full Transitional Program to go beyond the “withdrawal” of the pension reform to the seizure of power?
Any revolutionary workers party has to say in advance that a Political General Strike cannot succeed without raising the class consciousness necessary to build workers’ councils and militias capable of taking advantage of the defeat of Macron and to go on to defeat the bourgeois state and install a Workers’ Government. Again, this is elementary Marxism after the Paris Commune and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. For a group that is part of the Permanent Revolution Collective, it betrays that theory/program with a centrist adaptation to the conception of what is ‘possible’ rather than what is ‘necessary’ to advance the revolution – the Transitional Program and Permanent Revolution!
Proletarian Demands are Transitional Demands:
Trotsky’s Fourth International was founded on the Transitional Program for socialist revolution, concentrating the lessons and method of advancing the socialist program, of developing the class consciousness of the workers and mobilizing for the fight for state power. He fought every alien class force the workers’ movement experienced in his time and fought the expression of those forces when they took programmatic deviation forms, just as Marx, Engels and Lenin had.
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.
The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie. However, the achievement of this strategic task is unthinkable without the most considered attention to all, even small and partial, questions of tactics. All sections of the proletariat, all its layers, occupations and groups should be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution.
The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, “minimal” demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism – and this occurs at each step – the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old “minimal program” is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
Trotsky was very clear that the program was the means for developing proletarian leadership and raising the class consciousness of the working class (Leon Trotsky, “The Political Backwardness of American Workers (1940)“):
“…What can a revolutionary party do in this situation? In the first line give a clear honest picture of the objective situation, of the historic tasks which flow from this situation irrespective as to whether or not the workers are today ripe for this. Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what the program should formulate and present before the advanced workers. Some will say: good, the program is a scientific program; it corresponds to the objective situation — but if the workers won’t accept this program, it will be sterile. Possibly. But this signifies only that the workers will be crushed since the crisis can’t be solved any other way but by the socialist revolution….”
Stand with Trotsky!
For the ruling class their right to private property is congruent with the workers right to homelessness, to limited education, to unaffordable healthcare, to climate catastrophe. We reject the capitalist claim to superior bourgeois right!
Bourgeoisie has one right for workers…the right to a police bullet
Firefighter shot by police pulled to safety by workers under Red Flag
For the survival of the one productive class in society, the working class, the capitalists control of production and private accumulation of surplus value must be ended by the socialist revolution. The fight for socialist revolution begins with every minimum demand and advances through the intervention of vanguard and revolutionary workers to transitional demands and the conquest of all power by the workers and the oppressed. The program must be “indissoluble” (Trotsky), popularized at every opportunity by the workers’ revolutionary party.
End wage slavery! The minimum wage is a slave wage! We do not fight for a poverty trap! We say make the bosses pay!
For Safe and Healthful Jobs For All With Living Wages!
Safe, healthy habitation for all! We must establish housing as a human right.
For massive investment in slum clearance under local workers’ council control!
Share the work! Share the gains in productivity! For 28 hours work for 35 hours pay! For a Sliding Scale of wages and hours to spread the available work!
No to “externalities!” Make the bosses’ pay the tax burden of environmental remediation, not the drivers, truckers or small farmers! Those who profited from fouling the planet must pay now! Open the books! Accept no cries about bankruptcy! Profit is not a right superior to life! Collect the environmental debt the capitalists’ power and privilege rest on.
The bosses want to work you till you die so the banks can save on pensions!
Defend and expand social medicine and public education!
For fully funded, nationalized education and healthcare under workers control!
Socialize big pharma and the whole for-profit healthcare industry without compensation to big shareholders.
Significantly reduce the retirement age! Pensions for all and more time to enjoy it! Because the workplace is not under workers control and as such imposes severe financial and physical stress on manual labor it robs life of six to seven years during labour’s production of goods and services.
Down with Social Chauvinism! Defend the Roma and all minority and immigrant populations from right wing, racist and fascist attacks! FREE ALL political and class struggle prisoners! Abolish the “anti-terrorism” laws, the rulers’ racist measures against immigrant rights! Full citizenship rights for all!
For a victorious Paris Commune the revolution must be international! Our class enemy is at home! For solidarity labor action with anti-imperialist forces in the semi-colonies and former colonies. Publish all of Paris’ secret treaties! Free Martinique and Guadeloupe and all the colonies!
Down with Imperialism! Defeat French military interventions! Since 2001 France has intervened in Afghanistan; Ivory Coast; Chad; Libya; Somalia; Mali; Central African Republic; Syria and Iraq.
Defeat Fascism! Against the danger of fascist preparations and anti-union and anti-immigrant terror, we need troops and veterans to train workers militias, to make every picket line the front line and conduct comprehensive fraternization and propaganda to win the troops to the workers’ cause! Police are not “uniformed service” workers but state brutalizers and killers! Abolish the police! Form neighborhood Committees!
Our class enemy is at home! Fight the class war at home not the imperialist wars abroad! Bring troops deployed abroad home now! For rank and file military committees! For rank and file election of officers! Arrest the capitalist state’s officers!
France Out Of NATO! Down With Imperialist Blocs East And West!
Down with the EU! For A Socialist United States Of Europe!
Build workers’ councils and self defence committees! Elect recallable delegates to a national workers’ council!
Down with the labour bureaucracy! For rank and file control of the unions! Build strike committees and coordinate regionally and nationally! Prepare the political general strike to bring down the Government!
For a Workers’ Government based on Workers Councils and a Workers Militia to expropriate industry and banks! For a planned socialist economy under workers control!
For a Revolutionary Workers Party and a new Workers International, the World Party of Socialism, based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program!
- International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (02/09/2020)
[*] We have corrected our mistaken reference to FLTI’s French section ‘Permanent Revolution’ . The FLTI does not have a French section. Our apologies for the error.
