P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
May 1968 was, let me repeat again, the first phase of the socialist revolution in France. The crisis which would have led to the taking of power in the space of a few days has given way to a period of great strikes in which state power is no longer an immediate objective. Another revolutionary wave will follow. It is impossible to say when, but it undoubtedly will come. The objective conditions (among others the situation of the French economy in the international economic context) will play an important role in touching it off.
Already the French capitalists complain bitterly about the concessions they were compelled to make to the workers. The French economy, they say, will not be able to meet international competition. This argument has no special validity for the workers whose interests are opposed to those of the capitalists. Furthermore, it is rather exaggerated because the capitalists in other countries will soon be forced to make concessions to those they exploit for fear they will follow the French example. The French economy’s difficulties lie elsewhere. On the one hand, in spite of the process of concentration which it has been undergoing, concentration in many areas is still far from the level attained in other countries. The workers’ only interest in this matter is to seek ways to prevent this concentration from being effected at their expense.
The French economy is also suffering from the policy of “grandeur” inflicted on it by de Gaulle. This policy commits the French economy to the execution of immoderate projects, some of which are dangerous and useless, like the “force de frappe” [France’s nuclear striking force], others of which must be realized at prices higher than would result from a rational utilization of the international division of labor. De Gaulle and the men around him are for “independence” at any price, that is at the price of the greatest sacrifices by the workers. Will May give de Gaulle and his agents pause to reflect on this score? In any case, the workers will no longer submit to the sort of thing they have been experiencing for the last 10 years.
There is still one more point which must be stressed about the economy. Haven’t we been told ad nauseam about de Gaulle’s realistic financial policy in which the franc is solidly backed by gold? On this point as on all others this great mind has proved its bankruptcy.
It is worth spending a little extra time on the subjective conditions because the vanguard has the real possibility of altering these in a favorable direction. Many political and organizational problems are posed on widely differing levels. In particular, important political questions exist: It is impossible to raise the question of the government without answering the question of what programs an alternative government would have. Problems of organizational policy arise for the vanguard at the level of the large masses and their organizations, at the level of a very broad vanguard in the more specific realm of action, and at the level of a numerically smaller but highly political vanguard. I obviously make no pretense of giving definitive answers to these questions. My aim is to provide the components which can serve as a basis for fruitful discussion. The events which have taken place are of such an importance, the richness of their lessons so great, the problems they pose so complex, that these questions cannot be resolved within a narrow circle.
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Leaving aside the problems posed by the economic strikes coming in the wake of the general strike, the following problems are on the agenda for the future in the arena of the broad masses: a perspective leading to the socialist society; the preparation of the great future struggles and of a revolutionary leadership to lead them; defense of the elements of “dual power” resulting from the May movement; the problems of universities and of education, where the conflict between the government and the interested parties – which concerns all workers – remains irreconcilable.
Defense of the students and university teachers against the bourgeois government will inevitably assume multiple forms, not all of which can be foreseen. One can be certain that the government will not long tolerate what is going on at the Sorbonne, where there is a revolutionary center, a fortress of socialism and internationalism. In order to carry out this defense, the great masses of people must be made to understand its importance. A system of ever closer ties must be established between the students and the workers. The government is trying to establish a distinction between the “good” students who want to pursue their studies, and the others who think of nothing but agitation. Developing a link between the students and the workers is not a one-day affair; it is still one of the tasks which the vanguard must work at on a day-to-day basis and for which it must step up its efforts.
This is not a secondary problem. It is not surprising that the two mutually hostile forces which have an interest in maintaining the established order, the bourgeois state and the PCF leadership, express themselves in more or less identical terms about the revolutionary movements among the students. In this sector the revolutionary socialist vanguard is politically dominant in fact and offers a valuable support for all revolutionary militants no matter what tendency they belong to.
Failure to understand the Sorbonne’s exceptional position today for the cause of world socialism would show an unpardonable blindness. New positions cannot be won if you are incapable of defending positions already conquered. The defense of the Sorbonne is the prime task of all revolutionaries at the present time.
I have pointed out the basic causes which prevented the movement from making the decisive leap to take power, that is, in the first place, the betrayal of the traditional leaderships, notably of the PCF and the CGT, which the most decisive masses follow; and, in the second place, the absence of organized forces able to constitute an alternative leadership in the eyes of the workers. This is not all. The militants who made up the revolutionary minority were handicapped by a considerable gap in their political arsenal – the lack of a transitional program.
What do I mean by that? From the moment the struggle began it was relatively easy to determine a program of the workers’ essential immediate demands: All that was necessary for that was to listen to the workers. Moreover, it was easy to explain that these demands could only be guaranteed by a government representing the workers and that any government tied to the bourgeoisie would be a means by which the class enemy could gain time before setting out to reconquer the lost ground. Beyond this however, questions were also posed which the revolutionary vanguard did not answer adequately. Even our own organization, the PCI, whose program holds an answer to these questions, was deficient in this regard. Caught up in the whirlwind of the events, it primarily answered the immediate questions and did not make sufficient use of the political armament it has possessed for years.
The questions which were posed can be summed up briefly:
These questions will arise anew as the next revolutionary crises develop. They will be posed even more acutely, for the coming mobilizations will not start off from immediate demands alone with only these as their object. Already certain demands were raised in May which exceeded the limits of the workers’ immediate demands.
The required program is what we have long called the transitional program; this term has been picked up by others but in a meaning we have rejected as false. To deal concretely with this question, let us start from the fact that in the course of the movement the CFDT advanced more general demands in connection with workers’ participation in the management of the plants. The workers in fact do not seek merely an improvement in their immediate conditions. They do not want to be cogs in the economy like cogs in a machine, only maintained better than in the past. Nor do they want to remain the objects they are in the capitalist economy. The CGT leaders responded to these questions, in the words of Seguy, that self-management was “a vague formula” (May 10 at Renault). This was quite simply the response of a bureaucrat for whom all power in the union, the party, the plant, or the nation must be in the hands of an apparatus. The Stalinist system has been and remains his model.
But the epoch of this system – which moreover never had any justification from a Marxist point of view – is now over. It is impossible to run society, the economy, the schools, the workers organizations, etc. ... unless the producers, the consumers, the participants, and the membership are democratically involved in running them. It is the bosses and the bureaucrats who are proving increasingly superfluous.
The desire for structural changes is recognized even by de Gaulle. In his recent radio interview, he tried once again to offer the same tired old nostrum – collaboration between capital and labor – as an invention by which both capitalism and communism could be disposed of. This discovery is just about as old as the first clashes between capitalism and the workers movement. De Gaulle, however, chose to specify one point of what, according to him, such collaboration would be: there must be a leader in command in the plants. This point of view is identical to his conception of society. There must be a leader – de Gaulle himself. This time he has dubbed his notion “participation.” We already got a long look in May at the kind of participation we will see in the coming period, the participation of the CRS and the Gardes Mobiles.
If the CFDT’s demands in the area of plant management are examined, it can be said that they engendered ambiguity in the arguments of those defending them. For the leadership of this union federation and a large number of its activists, these demands by no means represented a challenge to the capitalist order. Their objective, in the minds of the leadership and these activists, was to remove certain aspects in present-day capitalism carried over from the 19th century and to carry out a certain number of reforms which would enable the capitalist system to function more effectively. For other militants, these demands were meant to bring about the substitution of a socialist society for capitalism. In other words, in the minds of their promoters, these demands were intended to lead to the integration of the workers and their organizations into a capitalist state renovated on the technocratic model.
However, in our conception, the transitional program is a body of general demands which bring the masses, as they mobilize behind them, into conflict with the bourgeois state, which lead them to creating the first organs of a workers state, to seize the government and begin building a socialist society.
A transitional program must be an anti-capitalist program. And to be effective its internal logic must correspond to the logic of the mass movement. No organization can seek to establish it alone. Such a program can only be the product of confrontation in large assemblies in which not only workers, teachers, students, and intellectuals take part, as was outlined in the meetings in the Sorbonne and the universities, but also the representatives of all layers of the working population – housewives, soldiers, small businessmen, peasant-workers, etc. In regard to the universities, certain people associated the formula “student power” with that of “workers power,” etc. No such “power” can be effective in the framework of a capitalist state. Self-management – in the universities, the plants, or elsewhere – is only an effective force in the context of a state freed from capitalism and in which workers democracy prevails.
For the immediate future, a confrontation between needs and articulated demands can only take place in relatively restricted circles. However, in a period of revolutionary crisis the committees produced by the upsurge (workers committees, committees of housewives and small businessmen, peasants committees, soldiers committees, etc.) at once would be a place for formulating a real transitional program and could constitute a sort of national assembly of the working masses of the country. By federating on the local, regional, and national levels these committees would become the organs of the new government which would put this transitional program into effect. They would be the bodies on which such a government could be based and by which it could be controlled. A government thus constituted would really be a government of the toilers.
I have pointed out the confusion which occurred in the strike between bureaucratized trade-union bodies and strike committees. From what I have just said it clearly follows that committees and trade unions are not mutually exclusive. They are organs with different functions and different tasks. The workers will not cease to have immediate demands under the new regime, and the unions’ essential task will be to assure that these demands are defended. Although I do not deny the unions the right to have an opinion on more general problems, the committees will be the political form encompassing the broadest masses. It is there that the masses will be able to educate themselves as to the general functioning of society (planning, education, justice, international policy, etc.) through a confrontation of ideological currents and opposing programs. It is there that the masses will be able to make decisions which they will execute. These committees will thus become organs of a government which involves the masses in its functioning in a continuous manner and not in the form of the “democratic” farce of elections every four or five years. These committees – they were called Soviets in Russia in 1917 – are the organs affording the greatest flexibility for drawing in the broadest masses; they are the only way to prepare for the withering away of the state, according to the concept of Marx and Lenin.
I make no pretense of setting forth a finished transitional program here. I will limit myself to bringing out a few points which, above and beyond the demands already proposed, I think must form the basis of such a program:
Without a rationally applied transitional program it is impossible to mobilize masses of people. But how can this program be formulated by mass committees unless there exist at the different levels mentioned above organized groups to unite the masses, to pose the problems for them, to move them to action? I am going to examine the ways it seems possible to deal with the more general problem of building a revolutionary leadership in the plants, in the neighborhoods, and on a national scale.
In the arena of the large masses, the May movement unquestionably showed that, while the students were able to play a “detonator” role on several occasions, when the time came to take the leap of seizing power, a substitute leadership, or even the organized components of a substitute leadership, was lacking in the plants. I would stress the insistence with which the union leaders emphasized the opposition in the plants to “outside interference.” They had asked nothing from the workers in regard to their relating to other forces; rather they speculated on the most backward layers’ fear of being maneuvered. This was an echo from the Stalinists of the bourgeois refrain about “agitators” from God knows where, from abroad most often, etc., who were supposed to be stirring up the good French workers.
How can a substitute leadership, or the organized components of such a leadership, be created? If there had been real elected strike committees responsive to the will and aspirations of the ranks in a few medium-sized factories during the decisive hours, some of these committees, for example, could have taken the step of calling all the committees, or strong minorities in such committees, which agreed with them to a conference. This is not an invention on my part but a long-standing experience which has been renewed every time real strike committees have existed. Such committees, independent of the apparatuses, could have overcome the prejudice against “outside interference” and gained a hearing that the students could not.
The components of a substitute leadership for the revolutionary wave to come which, appealing and fighting for an independent policy in the factories, would offer the same sort of challenge to the CGT leadership’s reformist line there as UNEF and SNESup did during the May mobilization, cannot be created overnight. These elements of an alternative leadership can only be formed by beginning a struggle against the reformist line in the workers movement right now. This is particularly necessary in the unions. Since these are the workers’ permanent organizations, they regain their primary importance in normal periods, that is, in the intervals between acute struggle. What is primarily necessary in this regard is to achieve the conditions which would make it possible for the organized workers to choose between opposing positions: workers democracy in the unions, the factories, on demonstrations – in all the organizations it was eliminated from during the Stalinist years.
Here we face a crucial problem. And there is an obvious link, moreover, between the struggle against the authoritarianism of the Gaullist regime and the struggle against the omnipotence of the union leaderships. A reflection of this appeared at the time of the demonstration in the Charlety stadium, on the same day the workers rejected the Rue de Grenelle agreements. Shouts in conjunction were heard “De Gaulle Resign!” “Seguy Resign!”
This is not the place to go into detail on such a struggle inside the unions. It will be impossible to prevent a discussion of the line followed during the May mobilization in the CGT first of all as well as in all the mass organizations. Undoubtedly the CGT and PCF leaderships want to avoid such a debate. Their denunciation of “provocateurs” made this objective clear enough, one does not debate with provocateurs. However, this debate is inevitable because many trade-union activists have voiced fundamental criticisms of the line followed in May. Debate is also inevitable in the PCF. It is possible the leadership wants to “play out the fish” by keeping the membership busy with stepped-up activism, for example in the electoral campaign, and by touching,the sensitive chord of the militants which vibrates every time the government attacks their party.
Already in May the intellectuals voiced their demands within the PCF. In the June 5 l’Humanité an official PCF declaration mentions the existence of a letter addressed to the party leadership by a number of intellectuals in the PCF. To find out what was in the letter, however, you had to consult the issue of Le Monde appearing the same day. What was discreetly described in the PCF’s official statement as questioning “the application of the party’s policy” was put this way in the intellectuals’ letter:
“Their common revolt (of millions of workers; the youth in the factories, the universities, and the high schools; and the great majority of the intellectuals) challenges, in the guise of the Gaullist regime, the very foundations of the present social system. By seeking from the outset to put a rein on this exceptional enthusiasm, the leadership cut the party off from a great force for socialist renewal ... At the Gare de Lyon ... many Communists were there; but the party was not. This facilitated provocation by the government which was anxious to isolate and, in fact, crush the student movement. However, if it had not been for this movement ... the factories would not have been occupied ... and other opportunities would not have been opened up for struggle by the workers, whose role is decisive ... We cannot shirk the debate on orientations, on the structure and future of the revolutionary movement which these events demand. A frank analysis of the reality, and bold political initiatives must at all costs enable the development of links with the new forces which have revealed themselves in the struggle for socialism and freedom.”
As far as links with these new forces go, l’Humanité, speaking for the Stalinists who remain at the head of the PCF and the CGT, found no formula but denouncing them to the repressors, slandering the students who went to Flins as “provocateurs.”
The leadership wants a “debate” in the customary fashion – that is a speedy condemnation by the party central committee, which is simply a body for recording the decisions of the political bureau. But this operation will not be so easy to carry out. Is it true that Garaudy agrees with these intellectuals? And why didn’t l’Humanité mention that once these intellectuals had gotten a brush-off from the leadership in the June 1-3 meeting they occupied the headquarters of the Paris party federation of the Rue La Fayette for several hours? This is an example l’Humanité does not consider it desirable to make known ...
The PCF worker-militants who hold positions in the trade-union movement and the factories have been confronted with responsibilities, questions which threaten their relations with their comrades in the shops that affect them on a day-to-day basis. A number of these Communist militants will not be able to remain indifferent to the fact that their party’s policy toward the youth has gone bankrupt beyond all description. It is also known that Marchais’s notorious formula, “the German, Cohn-Bendit,” shocked many party members, who saw in it only a disagreeable lapse.
The elements of a major crisis have come together for the first time in the history of the PCF since its complete Stalinization: a leadership with impaired prestige; a policy repudiated by large strata of the workers; total bankruptcy in such an important area as the youth. The PCF and CGT leadership will certainly not give in without a fight. Indeed, its stubbornness in maintaining the party’s regime and policy is at least as great as de Gaulle’s in maintaining his authority in the state. One of the essential tasks which must be accomplished so that the next wave will not remain without a substitute leadership is to wage a struggle for discussion in the CGT without delay, and, for those who are members, in the PCF. This discussion must have as its starting point a balance sheet of the events of May 1968 and the policy pursued during this month. This struggle must be tied to the struggle for workers democracy so that the ranks will be able to choose between differing lines.
In the CGT this will clearly pose the question of the right of tendencies, that is the right of those who do not think like the leadership, to combine in order to defend nationally a common line in the various unions. At present this elementary democratic right is a monopoly and privilege of the leadership. How can anyone claim to fight for democracy in society and make a mockery of it in his own organization?
This battle for workers democracy – which clearly cannot be conducted abstractly, divorced from debate over the lines followed in May – is of crucial importance. It cannot be said with absolute certainty that the leadership’s betrayal of the movement would have been averted if workers democracy had existed. However, a betrayal in this case could have only been carried out under difficult conditions for the leadership. It would not have been impossible for a sufficiently strong minority of the workers to have succeeded in carrying the movement in action beyond the point it attained by its own momentum.
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Now let us move on to the level of a relatively broad vanguard. The first problem which arises is that of the action committees which sprang up spontaneously in May. These committees match their name. They have no definite program, no well-articulated hierarchical structure on a national scale. In actuality, they are groups of activists who intervene daily in the neighborhoods or factories to achieve objectives through action which cannot be obtained by legal means, or could only be so obtained at the cost of great exertion, expense, and considerable time. The existence of such action committees is obviously dependent on favorable circumstances, more specifically on more or less embryonic forms of “dual power.”
It is very important to maintain and strengthen these committees as long as circumstances permit by setting goals for them, whether defense of the existing elements of “dual power,” or the creation of new ones, or self-defense against the attacks of the repressive forces and the “civic action” forces evoked by de Gaulle. It is in fact inevitable now that the bourgeoisie will resort to using both repressive forces of the state and extralegal forces in order to carry out a campaign of intimidation and repression. This would be true not only if de Gaulle stays in power but also if a “government of the left” were established. It must not be ascribed to chance that among the recent workers’ demands the mass leaderships of all types, trade union or political, classical reformist or Stalinist, etc. ... never advocated the slogan of dissolving the repressive forces (CRS, Gardes Mobiles) in May when the anger at, and even hatred of, these forces by the masses was at its peak. These leaderships have bourgeois “statesmanship” and the bourgeois state cannot do without repressive forces.
It cannot be thought that a dead calm will reign in the interval between revolutionary crises. Now there are many incidents, of a greater or lesser import, of clashes between the social forces. In such conditions, a revolutionary policy must consist, among other things, in a sort of “political guerrilla warfare,” a continual harassment of bourgeois society at the most diverse points. Such a struggle increases the importance of the action committees in particular. They must be able to keep the masses awake, to gain a better knowledge of their demands, and, thus, to prepare their future actions.
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More complex problems exist in regard to the vanguard proper. The factors in this situation are the following: a) groups and organizations formed long ago with fully developed programs; b) militants whom the events of recent years have driven out of the PCF (Vigier and Barjonet are among the most well-known and the most recent examples). One cannot predict what tendencies or formations will emerge in the PCF and sooner or later be expelled from it. The problem of revolutionary regroupment in various forms is inevitably on the order of the day. Those who belonged to the PCF and leave it or are expelled from it cannot act in isolation if they want to remain political activists. For the most part, however, they are not inclined to enter formations organized long ago and whose program was developed without their participation. In the coming period, while the old organizations will recruit, new organizations will also develop on rather generalized political bases. These organizations will provide their members with a milieu enabling them both to gain new political experience and to clarify their positions.
The members of the French section of the Fourth International think that the definitive solution of the processes at work in the vanguard, assuring the victory of the socialist revolution, will lead to the constitution of a mass party based on the revolutionary Marxist program they have defended for long years. However, they have never thought that such a party would be created solely by individual recruitment, by people just joining the organization as it is at the present time. Parties are not created and do not develop in such a way.
The most complex problem is that created by new groupings of militants, like the “Mouvement Revolutionnaire” [Revolutionary Movement]. This organization was the first to be formed and it will certainly not be the last of its type. Such groups are not comparable to the old formations, generally filled with men of fixed centrist positions whose political labels vary periodically. These new organizations will be formed primarily by militants whose political development is being advanced by the events. The attitude of the Trotskyists toward such formations must be to assist their development toward firm revolutionary Marxist positions. There can be no question of employing prefabricated formulas or more or less sharp stratagems in dealing with them. Taking account of the dynamic character of such movements or formations, the Trotskyists’ political attitude will be to support them insofar as they are correct and to criticize them where they are wrong.
Obviously, the Trotskyists want to encourage the development of the revolutionary vanguard toward Trotskyist political positions. The organizational question arises as an accessory to this. One of the obstacles on this path is the present division of the Trotskyist movement in France. With a view toward reunification of the Trotskyist movement, the PCI appealed during the May 1968 events to two other formations claiming to be Trotskyist to consider ways of altering this situation of disunity. There was no response from the OCI. This organization, along with its youth group, the FER, pursued an aberrant policy in May which cut them off from the more politically mature part of the vanguard. On the other hand, a step forward was accomplished with the founding of a coordinating committee of the PCI, the UC and the JCR. The Revolutionary Marxist Group later joined this committee.
6. On these questions, see our publications: Apres de Gaulle? (After de Gaulle What?); The Death Agony of Capitalism, the Transitional Program; and Whither France? by Leon Trotsky.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005