[Ted Grant Archive Update] - The French revolution has begun

The general
strike in France earlier
this year has shattered the complacent attitude of the representatives of the
capitalists in Western Europe, and of the
reformists and those in the Labour Movement who believed that the so-called
“affluent society” had rendered Marxism obsolete. In the Western world, as a
result of the economic upswing since the war, they had claimed, classes and
class concepts as understood in the past were no longer relevant to a society
which had solved the problems of capitalism. Slumps and class struggle were a
thing of the past. With the pressures of capitalism, their bureaucratic
structure, and their history, the Stalinist parties became even more
bureaucratically degenerated than the parties of the Second International. All
these factors, together with their isolation from the masses, in their turn led
to a mood of pessimism and despair by the “Marxist” sects claiming to represent
the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. They developed a sceptical attitude towards the
revolutionary potential of the working class of the Western capitalist
countries. They viewed the possibility of socialist revolution in the West as
ruled out for decades. They sought salvation in the upsurge of the colonial
world, finding in the peasants of the under-developed world the new
revolutionary class which would solve the problems of the revolution.

In other
articles and pamphlets we have made an analysis of this perspective pointing
out its falsity and inadequate understanding of the processes taking place in
the capitalist world. Analysing the process taking place in the main capitalist
countries we forecast the inevitability of sudden and abrupt changes which
would alter the relationship of forces between the classes and end the foetid
and poisonous atmosphere in which Marxists have been forced to work for almost
a generation.

Such a change
is the “May revolution”, as bourgeois commentators have named it, in France. France is the
“classical country” of the class struggle. It is rich in movements of the
workers and of the French people beginning with the bourgeois revolution in
1789, and the following revolutions, culminating in the Paris Commune. It is
the country which first established bourgeois bonapartism or the
military-police capitalist state. It has seen a succession of regimes,
revolution being followed by counter-revolution, and again being followed by
revolution.

After the
experiences of the Commune, the cowardly French bourgeoisie preferred to invest
their capital in the colonies or abroad, and keep the working class, with its
great traditions, as a minority of the population. They continued this policy
between the wars, relying heavily on their Empire and “usurers capital”. The
world slump of 1929-33 affected them later and hit them harder. This prepared
the way for the forerunner of the May upsurge, the stay-in strike of 1936,
which was betrayed by the “strike-breaking conspiracy” of the Peoples’ Front.
Again, as in previous movements of the French people, analysed by Marx in the 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the cowardice and treachery of the “petit
bourgeois democrats” prepared the way for reaction, the demoralisation of the
French people, the victories of Hitler and the occupation of France in the
Second World War.

Rather than
face the danger of a second Commune, the French ruling class preferred to
surrender to the Nazis. The events of the Second World War regenerated the
movement of resistance among the French working class and the French people
generally. The members of the Communist Party were in the front rank. The mass
of the population had a mood of violent revulsion at the collaboration between
the ruling class and the occupying Nazis. Once again the leaders of the
Communist Party and the Socialist Party collaborated in a “National” or
“coalition” or Popular Front Government in the post-war period. Lenin all his
life had fought against such a concept. He stood for the independence of the
working class from all capitalist parties. The winning of the working class and
the other strata of the middle class by fighting for their interests and
drawing them away from their capitalist exploiters was central to his whole
approach.

The powerful
post-war upsurge was crushed by the policy and tactics of the Communist Party
leadership. They used their regained prestige, due to the heroic efforts of the
rank and file, to save French capitalism from destruction. Their argument at
that time was the “danger of a Third World War” if capitalism in France was overthrown.
They remained in the Government of De Gaulle which massacred their Vietnamese
comrades in Saigon and Hanoi, which conducted
the war of intervention and which broke strikes and the movement of the
peasants in France.
When they had done their dirty work, together with their comrades in the rest
of Europe, American Imperialism and its satellites fell out with the Moscow bureaucracy and
the “cold war” began. On the instructions of Stalin they posed as
“irreconcilable revolutionaries”. Also at that stage they were haunted by the
fear of being outflanked from the “Left”. They began a movement of
“opposition”. They were thrown out of the Government and then indulged in all
sorts of wild adventures. But the working class is not a tap which can be
turned on or off at the whims of bureaucrats. Their policies had demoralised
the workers, and whereas in 1944-47 they could call demonstrations in Paris alone of a million
people, they were fortunate to get hundreds at their anti-American
demonstrations.

At the height
of the war against the Algerian people, the Communist Party offered only
passive opposition. The failure of the Communist Party leadership to give an
internationalist lead led in its turn to the Algerian struggle taking a purely
nationalist form. This drove the white settlers into the arms of fascist
reaction. Thus the opportunity was created 10 years ago for the rise of a new
Bonapartism in the form of General De Gaulle. For this the Communist Party
leadership and that of the Socialist Party had a great responsibility (See: Ted
Grant, “France in Crisis”, May 1958).

The last
decade, under the regime of “personal power” witnessed the fast
industrialisation of formerly backward France. The privilege of
backwardness was ended with the Second World War, the revolt of the colonial
peoples, and the further development of competition on world markets. The
French bourgeoisie was compelled to try and modernise the economy for French
imperialism to maintain even a secondary role in the world. The ruined peasants
streamed into the towns, foreign workers were employed by hundreds of thousands
on the worst and most unskilled jobs, and French industry leaped forward. But
the benefits of this increased production were very unevenly shared. While the
standard of living, especially of the more skilled workers, rose absolutely,
their share of the increased production dropped.

It was in
this atmosphere that the student revolt developed. This was a symptom of the
malaise in society. The sons and daughters of the middle class, upper middle
class, and even of the bourgeoisie were in revolt against the rotten values of
the ruling class. This movement is a symptom of the crisis in the capitalist
world. The demonstrations of the students were viciously attacked by the picked
riot police of the C.R.S., notorious for their thuggery and brutality. The
beating up of demonstrators only inflamed the students even more and led to the
outbreak of fighting on the barricades in the Latin Quarter, the seizure of the
universities in Paris and then throughout France. This in its turn led to a
movement among the secondary school children.

The
leadership of the Communist Party, haughty and solid bureaucrats through and
through, denounced the students in hysterical terms, as “adventurists”,
“provocateurs” and “ultra-lefts”. While undoubtedly there were many
effervescent and confused elements, the students marching under the red flag of
Socialism and the black flag of the anarchists, were instinctively striving to
find the road to a new society and to the working masses. The population of
France and especially the working class was stirred to a revulsion against the
regime by the sadism of the police in their attacks on the students.

The Communist
Party, the Trade Union leaders of the C.G.T., C.F.D.T. and Force Ouvriere, the
United Socialist Party, and the so-called Socialist Democratic Federation of
the Left which comprised the Socialist Party and remnants of some bourgeois
republican parties called a general strike. They felt the wind of anger blowing
within the masses and called for demonstrations. Ten million workers answered
the strike call and 800,000 to 1 million marched in the demonstration in Paris on May 13^th.

At each time
of crisis this trick of a 24-hour general strike has been used by the Communist
Party leadership in the post-war period. “Let the masses let off steam” seemed
to be their philosophy, “Everyone will be satisfied, and we can then return to
the old game of declamations and parliamentary speeches and show our
r-r-r-r-revolutionary spirit of opposition now against Gaullist personal rule.
In time the way will be prepared for a new version of the Popular Front, the
workers will have done their duty, and then everything would return to
‘normal’.”

This time it
was not to be. The atmosphere had been too charged with the electricity of
discontent. The accumulated resentments of a generation of capitalist reaction
were coming to a head. Beginning with the aviation workers, in one Sud Aviation
factory, then the car workers at Renault, the workers in one industry after the
other began the seizure of the factories. Workers on the railways, metro,
buses, in engineering, coal, chemicals, steel, marine, shipyards and ships, and
in other industries occupied their factories. Within days the movement had
spread to the white collar workers, the teachers and professors, the big
offices, the banks and post offices, sorting offices, the labour exchanges,
even the Observatories, the department stores and insurance offices. Ten
million industrial and white collar workers were on strike. In the last stages
the agricultural workers and peasants and the clerical staff of the prefectures
came out on strike or joined the movement. If the electricity, gas and water
workers did not come out it was because while they were refusing to supply
industry they did not want to cut off electricity, gas and water from the homes
of ordinary people, under the demagogic appeals of their “leaders”.

In contrast
with the general strike of 1926 in Britain, this was a spontaneous
movement of revolt from the bottom. It was the young generation of workers in
the factories, not burdened with the cynicism engendered by the betrayals of
the past who initiated the movement. It was in the spirit of the great
traditions of the French working class and of the French people. Symbolic of
the mood of the workers were the red flags flying over the factories, labour
exchanges, department stores, ships and offices. It was the greatest strike movement
in the history of the working class. All the more significant is that one wave
after another of the industrial and white collar workers joined in without any
lead from above. Factories which had been unorganised, or as with Citroën had
“company unions” and armed guards to keep out “agitators” or union organisers,
joined the rest of the working class. The white collar-workers demonstrated the
same militancy as their industrial brothers. The “State” was paralysed! At the
height of the struggle even the police showed that they were unreliable! This
included even the reactionary C.R.S., who had been used with great brutality
against the student demonstrations and were then made the scapegoat. The Police
Federation went further and issued a declaration that they were in sympathy
with the demands of the workers and had similar grievances of their own.

De Gaulle had
announced a plebiscite on the radio and television. But the printers refused to
print the forms! Attempts to get the forms printed in Belgium failed.
The Belgian printers, demonstrating international solidarity, refused to
blackleg against their French brothers. The mighty Bonapartist state—the “Strong State”
which had been depicted by some revolutionaries—was impotent.

Had the
“Communist Party” been a revolutionary movement the power of the capitalist
class would have been broken. The main task was the linking of the factory
committees, locally, regionally and nationally. This would have given the
latent power of the workers structure and form. To the workers’ committees
could have been joined those of the students, peasants, housewives, small
businessmen, the army, and in their mood then, even the police. This was the
situation which called for “audacity, audacity and again audacity”. In Italy, in America,
in Britain, in West Germany, in fact the entire Western World,
the capitalists viewed with horror and dismay the beginning of the Socialist
Revolution in France.
An irony of history: the bourgeoisie of the entire Western World saw as their
only consolation the fact that the Communist Party leadership was a force of
conservatism and had become a party of order. The Russian bureaucracy and its
satellites were busily denouncing as a slander conjured up by the world
bourgeoisie the idea that France
was in a revolutionary crisis.

In the words
of Trotsky, the Stalinists in France
“put the thermometer under the tongue of old lady history and decided that the
situation was not revolutionary”.

It is
necessary under these conditions to use the ideas of Marx and Lenin in order to
expose this cant. To these gentlemen we say, “What is a revolutionary
situation?” Answering the same cowardly attitude by Plekhanov, who said in 1905
that the workers should not have taken up arms “when the situation was not
revolutionary”, Lenin, echoing Marx, analysed carefully, the conditions for
revolution. The first condition is the vacillation and split in the ruling
class. Who can deny that during the height of the May events there was panic in
the ranks of bourgeoisie reaching up even to the pinnacle of power, with the
demoralisation of the Bonaparte De Gaulle? The second condition is the wavering
of the petit bourgeoisie looking for a way out either from the workers or the
capitalists. As Lenin explained, with a firm policy from the working class,
under these conditions, they would win the support of the middle class. The
third condition is the readiness to struggle on the part of the working class.
Who can deny the readiness to fight of the French workers as shown by the spontaneous
movement after the token strike called by the Left parties and all the Trade
Union Federations? In the past this harmless manoeuvre had succeeded in
preventing the workers from moving into action. But not this time. As sketched
above, layer after layer of the proletariat and white collar workers and even
the peasantry moved into action. The truth is that it was the fourth condition
outlined by Lenin which was absent. This was a mass revolutionary organisation
with a far-sighted revolutionary leadership which was democratically controlled
by the workers and ready to take the boldest steps to achieve the victory of
the working class.

How
degenerate these gentlemen have become over the decades of Stalinist crimes! In
France and the other
countries of Western Europe the leadership of
the so-called Communist Parties had become integrated into the structure of the
old society. On a higher level we have a repetition of the crime of the social
democratic leaders which saved capitalism after the First World War. The
bureaucrats in Moscow, who have now developed
arteriosclerosis living their nice comfortable existence, were even more
terrified than the capitalists in the West at the spectre that they thought
they had laid of a new and higher version of the October Revolution, this time
in industrial France.

“The
situation was not revolutionary!” Just consider how Lenin castigated the
Italian reformists in 1920 at the time of the seizure of the factories by the
Italian workers. The Italian socialist leaders too, trembling before the action
of the working class, declared that the situation was not revolutionary. How
Lenin scorned and reviled these “traitors”. What would he have said about such
a magnificent movement as that of the French workers, a hundred times as great
in its scope, in its depth, and in its paralysis of the forces of capitalism
and their state? And yet in this situation all that the so-called Communist
Party leadership does is to plagiarise all the worst features of the reformist
leaders. All the leaders of the Communist Parties of the world are dragging out
the distorted quotation from Engels, against which Engels himself complained,
and of which Lenin wrote in acid terms in his polemic against Kautsky and the
“Left reformists” and “heroes of the Second International”. Lenin had so
painstakingly refuted this vile trick of pretending that Engels in his old age
had become a mild reformist. Alas, alas, Palme Dutt, always ready to eat his
words in the interests of the Stalinist apparatus, and echoing the revolutionary
romanticism of his youth, had written in May—before the events—in the
journal of the so-called international Communist Movement an indignant
criticism of denigrators of Engels who used this very quotation, lamenting that
Marx’s “far-sighted warning…against the danger of the trend of petit-bourgeois
reformism…or the anger of Engels over the falsification of [the] 1895 Preface
to the Class Struggles in France” were ignored. (World Marxist Review,
May Issue)

Waldeck
Rochet and all the epigones of Communism try and argue that it was only a
movement for higher wages and better conditions. What was the October
Revolution but a struggle for “Peace, Bread, Land”? But the problem for the
Communist Party, like the Bolsheviks in Russia, was to link up the demands
of the masses with the need for the Socialist Revolution. Our new reformist
heroes try to prove too much. If it was “only” a struggle for better conditions
and wages why did the Communist Party issue a declaration by Waldeck Rochet in
a special edition of their organ, L’Humanité which said:

“Millions of manual
workers and intellectuals are on strike, the aspiration of all the people to a
real change of regime does not cease to grow…on the political plane the problem
of power remains more than ever posed. The Gaullist regime has outworn itself.
It must go. To achieve the aspirations of the workers, of the teachers, of the
students it is necessary that the State ceases to be a tool of the monopoly
capitalist…That is why the French Communist Party considers that it is
necessary to take a step towards Socialism, proposes not only the
nationalisation of the big banks but of the great monopoly industrial
enterprises which dominate the key sectors of the economy.”

The leaflet
goes on to say that the Communist Party stands for the “democratic control of
the national enterprises and the establishment on all layers of economic life
of workers control; to begin by the extension of the role of the factory
committees and the free activity of the Trade Unions in the enterprises…it is
necessary to end the power of the monopolies and with it the Gaullist power and
to promote a popular Government leaning on the support of the people.” What is
this all about? If the workers were only interested in wages and conditions at
a time when the Gaullist regime was cracking and under the pressure of the
working class why did the Communist Party distribute this declaration
throughout France?
One thing or the other—either the situation was revolutionary, or the Communist
Party leadership was guilty of cynical demagogy.

“Ah…” say the
faint hearts, as they have always said before every revolution, “What about the
Army?” Waldeck Rochet explains profoundly that they did not want to send the
workers to be crushed by the tanks of Massu. In the Morning Star the
Editor of L’Humanité also wrote on the danger of the armed forces. That
new Vicar of Bray, Palme Dutt, wrote in the Labour Monthly the opposite
of what he had written a few months before and denounced the “ultra Lefts” for
light-mindedly forgetting the “menace of the Army”. As usual he finds a
convenient quotation against the frivolity of the anarchists, while forgetting
that in the very same material Lenin protected his rear against sophists like
Dutt by his implacable criticism of opportunism. But let us examine this
question of the army a little closer. De Gaulle visited Massu after the
collapse of his attempt at a referendum. The “personal power” against which the
Stalinist leaders are always railing rests not only on elections but on the
army and police. It was allegedly fear of the army, which would crush the
workers, that paralysed the leadership of the Communist Party. One can then ask
these parliamentary cretins: if the capitalists could use the army before the
elections, why not after a “democratic victory” at the polls? In
reality, as the Times clearly explained, to try and use the army would
be to break it. In every revolution the attempt of reaction to use the army,
which is composed of workers and peasants, will split it from top to bottom. It
is true that a revolution can be defeated, but when one has a situation like
that in France
with a complete paralysis of the State then the issue can be decided by the
quality of the leadership of the working class.

How gladly
the leadership of the Communist Party seized on the Gaullist trick of the
dissolution of the Assembly and elections. Then in order to keep up with their
“allies” in the tops of the so-called Left Federation and in order not to
frighten away the lawyers and professional politicians, who provide an
alternative face for the bourgeoisie, they dropped the very radical demands
listed above. In order to show themselves as respectable and not the famous
wild man with a knife between his teeth they tried to compete with the Gaullists
as a party of “Law and Order”.

When the
party of the working class, or more correctly the party claiming to represent
the working class, tries to compete with the representatives of tie bourgeoisie
on this level they are asking for a defeat. Had the Communist Party fought the
elections on the programme as outlined in the Declaration of Waldeck Rochet and
at the same time made a determined effort to win over the middle class and
peasantry by a programme catering for their needs—had they emphasized that the
needs of the workers and the people generally could only be satisfied by the
overthrow of capitalism and a change in society—they would not have suffered a
defeat at the polls.

However, the
elections demonstrated the polarisation in France of class forces; the working
class and its parties on the one side and the bourgeois parties clustered round
Gaullism on the other. The fact that the P.S.U., Party of Socialist Unity,
which stood to the left of the Communist Party gained half a million votes, while
the Communist Party itself lost six hundred thousand is significant. However,
while there were ten million strikers in the country, the left parties only
received nine million votes. Where did the other million go? It is clear that
many strikers together with their wives must have voted for the bourgeois
parties and even the Gaullists. That was the penalty paid because of the policy
of the Communist Party.

The elections
marked a victory for reaction in France. While the cretins of the
Communist Party were putting their faith in the elections, all the bourgeois
observers were pointing out that the election results were secondary as far as
the movement of the masses in France
were concerned.

However, the
immediate effect was undoubtedly a fall in the spirit of the masses. The
Communist Party has used the election results as a justification of the idea
that there was no revolutionary situation in May.

In fact, they
are responsible for electoral defeat and the immediate change in the situation
which it has provoked. The Communist Party leadership is silent in Britain and
other countries on the results of the immediate psychological defeat for the
working class. The “Patronat” have taken revenge for the fright which the
events of May had given them.

Tens of thousands
of militants in the factories and enterprises, in the technical institutes and
white collar trades have been victimised. A real witch-hunt has taken place in
the factories on one pretext or another.

Here it is to
be noted that the C.G.T. gained a modest four hundred members, while its rival
the ex-Catholic federation, C.F.T.D., doubled its membership by gaining
one-and-a-half million members during the May events, and it is now bigger than
the C.G.T. Together with Force Ouvrière the trade unions must now number over
six million, although in the French tradition, tens, even hundreds of thousands
of workers will tend to drop out of the unions in disgust when they see their
gains in the great May events being whittled away. Already the trickery of the
employers, the measures of the state, inflation, and all the other effects of
the underlying crisis of the capitalist system in France have partially wiped out the
gains. At the same time the small businessmen and the peasants will be also
affected. Tens of thousands of small businessmen will become bankrupt. Hundreds
of thousands of peasant small holders will no longer be able to make a living
and be driven into the cities. The unemployed and the youth will become further
disaffected. The students will find that there are not enough jobs in the
professions.

The election
results mark a temporary set back in the movement of the working class and the
people of France,
towards the Socialist Revolution. It has given time for the capitalist reaction
to consolidate itself. There will be a purge of police and a stiffening-up of
the ranks of reaction. Preparations will be made systematically in all of the
big towns to “deal” with the workers and students. But not even the Gaullist
election victory and the repression of militants in the factories will be able
to prevent a new surge forward of the French revolution at a later stage.

The situation
is analogous to that of the revolution in Spain of 1931-1936. In Spain, after
the fall of the Bonapartist dictator Primo De Rivera and the overthrow of the
monarchy, there was a Republican-Socialist coalition which broke strikes and
shot down the peasants when they tried to seize the land. This prepared the way
for the victory of the right wing Republican and Catholic Fascist reaction in
the elections. This in turn prepared the way for the Catholic-Fascist Gil
Robles to be taken into the coalition. Meanwhile, under the influence of
international events the Social Democracy in Spain
had evolved to the left and the reply to the inclusion of Catholic-Fascists
into the coalition government was the insurrection in the Asturias Province.
This was defeated and prepared the two black years (Bienio Negro) of
reaction in Spain.
This in its turn prepared the way for the onslaught of the workers ending in
the victory in the elections of the Popular Front in February 1936. There began
an uninterrupted movement of the workers and peasants against the liberal
Popular Front Government. There was one General strike after another in the
cities, one protest movement after another, of the peasants in the countryside.
To save themselves the capitalist class through the Generals launched the
conspiracy of July 1936, which culminated in the counter insurrection on the
part of the working class. It resulted in the smashing of the bourgeois state
in so-called Republican Spain. It would take us too far from the question under
discussion to deal with the reasons for the defeat of the Spanish Revolution of
1931-37, but the main factors were the policies of the mass workers’
organisations.

Of course,
events in France will not
develop in exactly the same pattern as those of Spain,
but Spain
provides a useful scheme of the process of the revolution. What has to be noted
is the process of swinging between upsurge and reaction, which takes place in
every revolution, and sometimes extends over many years. In Spain, it
unrolled over five or six years till we had the denouement of civil war.

In France, had the
Communist Party retained even a shadow of its revolutionary beginnings the
revolution would have assumed a peaceful character. It would have provoked a
wave of Socialist revolution throughout Western Europe and a political
revolution in Eastern Europe. The betrayal of
the Communist Party leaders makes the task of the overthrow of capitalism much
more arduous but it cannot prevent the movement of the working class to change
society.

A paradox of
the events lies in the fact that the very defeat caused by the Communist Party
will temporarily succeed in holding it together, as far as the mass of the
working class is concerned. The working class as a mass, though conscious of
its power in the May days, will be bewildered by the turn of events. The
propaganda of the Communist Party will have some effect. The workers and particularly
peasants and middle class will see that they have been fooled and panicked by
the propaganda of the Gaullists into voting for reaction. They will say it
would have been better if the Communist Party and the Left Federation had won
the elections. There will inevitably be a big swing of the masses in the
direction of Popular Frontism.

Of course it
is true that the most advanced layers in the factories, the militants of the
C.G.T., and many of the militants who remain members of the Communist Party,
will have had their eyes opened as to the counter-revolutionary role which is
played by the Communist Party leadership. Apparently, there are still many
action committees in existence in the factories, enterprises and districts.
These militants, especially the layer of young worker militants who led the
struggle, will later coalesce into some form of organisation. But at the
moment, they must understand that the vital need is that of patiently
explaining to the organised workers in the Communist Party, the P.S.U., the
Trade Union Federations and the other workers’ organisations in these events,
otherwise they will tend to become demoralised and despairing themselves. This
layer can only play a role in so far as they integrate themselves with the
masses and understand that the “May Days” were only the beginning of the
process of Socialist Revolution. Just as Lenin explained after the February
Revolution of 1917 that it was only the lack of consciousness on the part of
the Bolsheviks and the working class which prevented them from seizing power,
owing to the cringing of the reformists before the bourgeoisie, so the
Communist Party in France
played an even more perfidious role. But only future events and the inevitable
new upsurge on the part of the workers will make clear the role of the
leadership of the Communist party to the broad masses. Alas, it is only through
yet another experience of Popular Frontism and the victory of the Communist
Party and Left Federation in the elections that this will become clear.

At the
moment, where the revolutionary forces are very weak, the place where the
revolutionary militants should conduct their work is within the Communist
Party, the P.S.U. and the Trade Union Federations. But it is no use being in
the Communist Party and the other arenas of work if one conducts this work with
one’s mouth firmly shut. Even worse is the case where the work is conducted by
people hiding their ideas and making themselves as inconspicuous as possible by
assuming the colouration of the dominant trends within these organisations. To
pretend to be something for a long period, chameleon-like, is to become
virtually that thing itself. Only by boldly quoting the ideas of Lenin and even
the ideas advocated by the French Communist Party in the past, not by merging
with but by distinguishing the militants from the grey Stalinist and centrist
currents, can gains be made now and later.

It is not
excluded that if the economy in France
should continue on a higher level the upswing of the past period Gaullism might
temporarily succeed in stabilising itself. This would be especially so if a big
part of the gains of the workers should still remain.

At a later
stage with the discrediting of Gaullism the masses of the industrial workers,
white collar workers and even a big section of the small shopkeepers and middle
class will turn to the Popular Front as a way out. The coming to power of a
Popular Front will take place under entirely different conditions and with the
militants already aware of the role of the Communist Party leadership. The
classes will become more polarised even than they are at the present time.
Under the cloak of the Popular Front the capitalist class will seriously
prepare to settle accounts with the working class. Fascist organisations will
appear on the Right, armed and financed by big business. Under the blows of
reaction there will be a crisis in the Communist Party. Unable to “deliver the
goods” “on the parliamentary road” there will develop the long-postponed crisis
in the Communist Party. It will split from top to bottom. That is the music of
the future, however, at a further stage of the Revolution.

The main
problem of Marxism in France
today is that of convincing the layers of action committees of the C.P. and
P.S.U. and trade union militants, which at the moment largely represent a small
minority of workers, of the need for preparation for the struggles to come. The
fact that they have come to understand the real role of the Communist Party in
and of itself is not enough. They have to understand that to convince the
workers will require not only their heroic and self-sacrificing work in the
factories and Unions but their education in the basic ideas of Marxism. Then
they will be enabled to explain, with the help of events, at each stage how and
why the “Communist” Party is no longer a Communist Party.

It is
interesting to compare the role of the students in France
to that of the students in Germany.
Because the situation in Germany
has not yet reached the stage of social tension which it reached in France the
students did not make the same impact on the working class. In France the
movement of the students is in a sense the reflection, sometime in advance, of
the discontent of the social layers from which they spring: the upper and lower
middle class. Only 12 percent are of working class origins. The movement of the
students acted as a “detonator” of the movement amongst the masses. The May
events were not consciously prepared for by any tendency among the workers and
especially not among the students. There was no conscious preparation for the
magnificent movement that unfolded. But even without the movement of
students big strikes were already beginning to take place and could only
have culminated as in May or in 1936. The workers’ movement was inevitable. It
is to be noted that in 1936 it was the movement of the working class which had
certain echoes amongst the students and not vice versa.

The students
could play an important role as a leaven if they adopted a modest attitude,
tried to understand Marxism and the need to integrate themselves with the
working class. The danger at the moment in France consists in the fact that
the students through the mistaken ideas and perspectives of some of the leaders
of the left organisations may regard themselves as a substitute for the masses
and engage in adventurism which can only play into the hands of the leadership
of the Communist Party.

It must be
understood that the bourgeoisie in France, like the workers’
organisations, was caught by surprise by the May events. It came out of an
apparently cloudless sky. The movement of the students had the sympathy in the
beginning of most of the population. The repression of the C.R.S. which
received wide publicity aroused disgust and revulsion amongst the people. The
stirring of the masses, in its turn, prepared the movement of the workers. One
young worker told a Times reporter: “The students came first. They acted
as a spark. They caused the government to yield…They gave us the feeling that
we could go ahead.”

Thus as in
every Revolution where there is not a Marxist mass organisation, muddled,
confused and temporarily inflated elements come to the surface. Thus it is that
having rejected the stagnant conservatism of the so-called Communist party the
students’ revolt has unfortunately been coloured by the clouded ideas of
Marcuse, Castro, Guevara and Mao. Without the discipline of Marxist ideas the
students can inflict tremendous damage on themselves and on the movement as a
whole. The Gaullist regime is burning for an opportunity of revenge against the
students, whom they see as the instigators of their humiliation in May. The
police have made systematic preparations to brutally crush any attempts at the
setting up of barricades in the Latin Quarter and other university areas in France. From
anarchists, Maoists and Guevarists one could not expect that they would
understand that the problem in a highly industrialised country like France cannot
be solved by methods of guerrilla war, particularly in urban areas. The main
task in France as in other countries in the West and the industrialised
countries of the East is that of winning over the vast majority of the working
class and behind them of the people to understand that the mass organisations
no longer stand for the solution to the problems of modern society. There
is no substitute for this. The very process of winning and making conscious the
unconscious process in the minds of the workers is really the sum and substance
of Marxism. In the past Marxism has fought a bitter battle against all
varieties of anarchism, and “direct actionism” as well as against opportunism.
It was thus that Lenin and Trotsky explained to the Socialist Revolutionaries
in Russia,
as Marx had explained to the anarchists in a previous epoch, that the attempt
to replace the movement of the masses by irresponsible adventurism is suicidal
for the participants concerned and actually blocks the path to the winning of
the masses. In France
there is the tradition of Blanqui who was a martyr and fighter for socialism
but who imagined that a courageous minority could replace the masses. In a
somewhat modified form there is the revival of these ideas of Blanqui in France at the
present time. No doubt the agent-provocateurs will be active among the students
to try and provoke a new barricade movement which could be forcibly repressed
by the police. Far from acting as a fuse, this time it could have the opposite
effect among the workers, and help the Communist Party to regain some of its
lost influence by a renewed attack on “irresponsibles”.

Not versed in
the theory of Marxism, with the discrediting of the Communist Party in advanced
student circles, it could be expected that in this milieu all sorts of weird
and fanciful theories should find an echo. But what is tragic in the situation
in France
is that some alleged Marxists should have so distorted the rich heritage of the
ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky that they should take the line of
least resistance and swim with this mudded current of ideas. In the last few
years in France,
big gains amongst the students have been made. However, it is a thousand times
necessary to hold high the banner of Marxism. Marxist ideas since the time of
Marx himself have a thread of continuity. Though the situation has changed in
fundamental respects, the basic ideas of Marxism still remain the guide to
action which they were intended to be. To replace them with the confused ideas
of Guevarism and Castroism is to miseducate the youth and to build a further
obstacle in the path of the workers. To abandon the ideas of Marxism like the
Maoists for hare-brained anarchist schemes of armed uprisings and bloody
encounters with the police in isolation from the movement of the mass of the
workers, is the very opposite of what Marx and his continuers have taught on
the theory of insurrection.

During the
course of the May events, by and large, the organisations claiming to represent
the ideas of Trotskyism put forward many correct ideas such as the linking of
the committees of action in the factories locally and nationally. They
correctly criticised the role of the Communist Party and the other mass
workers’ organisations in these events.

At the same
time they also made many errors by imagining that the first beginnings of the
Revolution in and of themselves could replace the need for a mass Marxist
organisation. They failed to understand that for the tiny Marxist wing of the
working class, comprising a few thousand at most, the subjective factor of the
Communist Party, of the P.S.U. and S.F.I.O. are for them objective factors
standing as gigantic obstacles in the way of the Socialist Revolution. One
cannot wish away the mass organisation, but only by correct policies and
methods in first winning the militants referred to above, and then capturing
through them the masses, can the way be cleared for the victory of the
Socialist Revolution in France.
To try and substitute for real events and actions on the part of the working
class activity by students separate and apart from the workers is a new theory
of revolutionary romanticism but has nothing in common with the method and
ideas of Marxism.

From the view
point of Marxists once De Gaulle had dropped his Bonapartist referendum and
turned to elections instead and the Communist Party had gladly taken this as a
means of diverting the masses away from extra-parliamentary struggle, then
unfortunately, given the weakness of the Marxist tendency, it was necessary to
change tactics. Unfortunately, this was imposed on the Left forces by their own
weakness. They could not offer a mass alternative of action to put in place
of the elections.

It was
correct to brand the policy of the Communist Party leadership as a base and
even sinister compromise with Gaullism in refusing to take power. But at the
same time to label the elections as treason and to divert the students, already
confused by petit-bourgeois ideas of anarchism and semi-anarchism, was to play
into the hands of the leadership of the Communist Party and to further confuse
and disorient the leading militant layers amongst the students. It was
necessary to explain to them: while denouncing the “treason” of the Communist
Party at the same time a class programme should have been put forward for a
Communist-Socialist Government with a worked-out programme of demands also for
the middle classes and peasants. Instead of parading with meaningless
denunciations of the elections, calling on the people not to vote, they should
have taken the declaration of Waldeck Rochet referred to above and
systematically campaigned among the militants, the factory workers, the serious
elements amongst the students, the Trade Unions, and workers organisations. In
this way they could have pointed to the failure of the Communist Party to fight
the election on this basis. They could have systematically ridiculed the
Communist Party leadership as the new proponent of “Law and Order” with
quotations from Marx’s 18th Brumaire.

Among
Communist Party militants also Lenin’s merciless criticism of Noske and
Scheidemann who also stood as proponents of “law and order” in the German
Revolution of 1918, could have been used to try and show them the real role of
their leadership.

The slogan of
“boycott the elections”, in so far as it had any affect at all, could only have
been negative: on the one hand reinforcing the prejudices of the students and
on the other hand alienating the workers. The results of the elections laid
bare the folly of the call for boycott: 80 percent of the electorate voted,
including the overwhelming majority of the workers.

These
comrades are sincere and of the best quality, especially the rank and file. At
the moment they are under the heavy boot of Gaullist repression with the
gleeful and silent complicity of the Communist Party. It is clear that every
sincere revolutionary throughout the world will render aid, sympathy and
support to these courageous comrades. But we would be doing a great injustice
to their sacrifice and to the sacrifice of the advanced layers amongst the
students and young workers if we did not at the same time criticise what we
conceive to be incorrect policies. The first and most imperative task of
Marxists in France, and of those in the rest of the world, who wish to give aid
to the French Revolution, is to understand the processes of the revolution
itself, to understand the problems of the revolution, to have a due sense of
proportion, to understand the forces at one’s disposal and the gap between
these forces and the great historic tasks which loom ahead. It is tragic not to
understand that, for the reasons analysed above, the Revolution in France will
pass through many phases of reaction and advance, of despair and movement
forward on the part of the working class.

Ted Grant

One thing is
clear: the Revolution in France
can never be accomplished until the mass of the working class understands the
role of the leadership of the Communist Party. In the inevitable new upsurge
which lies ahead in the coming years it is from the militants of the Communist
Party, of the C.G.T., C.F.D.T. and P.S.U. that a revolutionary party will be
constructed. Events themselves will undoubtedly result in a split in the
Communist Party from top to bottom, but to aid and fertilise this process is
the real task of the Marxists. The process can only be harmed by adventures and
attempts at short cuts. The whole essence of the Revolution lies in the change
in consciousness in the masses. This can only be assisted if the Marxists adopt
correct policies and tactics. Lenin and Trotsky made many mistakes but they
never made elementary blunders and they checked and rechecked their ideas and
theories on the basis of the masses. Never would they have allowed themselves
to abandon any of the fundamental ideas of Marxism. The mass revolutionary
party in France
will be created by the coming together of the elements mentioned above. The
British Marxists hope to assist in this process by producing this material. We
are convinced of the invincibility of the Socialist Revolution which has begun
in France and of its
widespread repercussions East and West, not least in Great Britain. We are also
convinced, as the history of the last fifty years has tragically demonstrated,
that only the well tested ideas of Marxism and no new-fangled “theories” (in
reality moth-eaten resuscitations of the past), can serve to create the
necessary instrument for the victory of the workers.