Popular Front of Racism, Austerity Paved the Way

France: Fascist Le Pen Scores Big Gain in Elections

Break with Class Collaboration! For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No.780, 3 May 2002

APRIL 29—The successful second-place finish by the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the presidential elections last Sunday has detonated a storm of protest in France. Almost daily, tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly high school students and other youth, have filled streets across the country in spontaneous and highly integrated demonstrations. The streets of Paris are covered with graffiti reading, “Asian, Arab, Black and White: Together!” and “No Nazis in This Neighborhood!” Yet the combative spirit and anger of the youth is being manipulated by the entire political spectrum in order to re-elect President Jacques Chirac, a right-wing racist thief! One placard at an April 27 demonstration in Paris expressed the “choice” in the runoff election: “Fascist or Crook—This Is Democracy?”

Last week’s election was a stinging repudiation of the class-collaborationist popular-front coalition—led by the Socialist Party (PS) and including the Communist Party (PCF) and the bourgeois Greens—which currently administers the French capitalist state. The government’s anti-working-class and anti-immigrant attacks paved the way for Le Pen’s second-place finish in the elections. Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin fell to one percentage point behind Le Pen’s 17 percent and was eliminated from the second round of elections, while PCF candidate Robert Hue garnered a scant 3.9 percent. Significantly, the self-avowed revolutionaries of Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) totaled a combined 10 percent of the vote.

Now, these same parties have cobbled together a reactionary national front, stretching from the right wing to the “far left,” to wrap Chirac in the French tricolor as the supposed “savior of Republican values.” The anti-Le Pen demonstrations are replete with nauseating chauvinism. Whitewashing the France of “Vigipirate”—the campaign of cop terror in minority communities—and embellishing the France of Vichy (the government of collaboration with the Nazis) and the Algerian War, the demonstrations are filled with signs and banners proclaiming that “la belle France” is not Austria or Italy, where ultraright or fascist-infested governments hold power.

Notably, the PS, PCF, Greens and LCR all issued leaflets proclaiming the same slogan: “Block Le Pen!” This means: Vote Chirac on May 5. Support to this right-wing politician can only strengthen his bonapartist appetites and lead to even more severe state repression against workers and the oppressed. At the April 27 demonstration of 50,000 people in Paris, the climate of “national unity” was so strong that the refusal by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France to call for a vote to Chirac provoked a storm of indignation. LTF signs at the demonstration proclaimed: “The PS/PCF/Green Popular Front Opened the Road to Le Pen’s Fascists!” and “Break with Class Collaboration! For a Genuine Revolutionary Multiethnic Workers Party!”

The large vote for Le Pen is part of a rightward shift in West Europe’s bourgeois political spectrum, from Spain and Portugal (where rightist parties are in power) to Denmark. In Austria, a coalition government including Jörg Haider’s openly racist Freedom Party (FPÖ) came to power two years ago. Last year, a popular-front government in Italy was replaced by the right-wing demagogue Silvio Berlusconi in coalition with the fascistic Lega Nord and the Alleanza Nazionale, which is currently primarily an electoral vehicle but also heir to the historic party of Mussolini’s fascism. In Germany, the right-wing Christian Democrats have found renewed strength, soundly defeating the governing Social Democrats last month in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

But the shift to the right in bourgeois politics has also been accompanied by a polarization at the base of European society. This is indicated in the vote for LO and the LCR and is particularly reflected in huge demonstrations in various countries in defense of immigrants.

By outlook and history, Le Pen is a fascist. But like Haider’s FPÖ, Le Pen’s National Front (FN) is currently scoring big gains primarily as an electoral party. Reactionary views alone do not define fascism. Contrary to fake leftists who cynically pretend that fascism is just around the corner in order to justify voting for Chirac, France is not currently besieged by organized fascist gangs attacking workers’ picket lines or assaulting parliament as the French fascists did in the 1930s.

As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote at the time in “Whither France” (October 1936): “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” Since the proletariat does not currently pose a threat to bourgeois rule, the French bourgeoisie sees no need to unleash its fascist dogs as a last resort to annihilate the workers movement. However, Le Pen’s electoral gain will indeed encourage the fascist bands to come out of their holes and carry out attacks on the most vulnerable sectors of society, in particular dark-skinned immigrants.

A significant threat is posed on May Day, when tens of thousands of workers and leftists mobilize to celebrate the workers’ holiday. Le Pen threatens to bring tens of thousands of his supporters to demonstrate the same day in Paris, posing the danger of pumped-up fascist bands roaming the streets and attacking workers, leftists and minorities. If the PCF, LCR or LO—or the CGT trade-union federation—were serious about stopping Le Pen, they would fill the Place du Châtelet with organized union members hours before Le Pen’s fascist thugs get there. They could stop the fascists before they start, but they won’t do this because such an action would open the road to the kind of independent political mobilization of the proletariat these loyal servants of bourgeois democracy fear more than Le Pen himself.

The smaller SUD labor federation, which is heavily influenced by supporters of the LCR, is likewise pushing the pro-Chirac line. But SUD militants at the Créteil postal facility issued a leaflet on April 26 declaring:

“The place for every conscious proletarian on May Day is in the streets. Not to defend the values of a republic in the service of capital, which engenders misery and so many other horrors...nor to help the defender of these same bourgeois values get back in the saddle.... If fascism is the mortal enemy of the working class, the bourgeois governments—of the right as well as the left—are our gravediggers. We must be in the street to affirm and exercise our social power, to ‘show the resolute will of the working class to overthrow class society and open the road to peace for all humanity,’ as the resolution of the Second International stated. We won’t leave our fate in the hands of the class enemy! Reclaim May Day as a day of international workers struggle!”

The rightward shift across Europe was prepared by social-democratic and popular-front governments that were brought to power in the 1990s to oversee the scrapping of public health care, pensions and other “welfare state” measures. Invariably, these capitalist regimes used anti-immigrant demagogy and terror to divide and divert the working class from united struggle against the capitalist offensive. With the economic downturn, immigrant “guest workers” became largely unneeded “surplus” labor. Without a job and without a future, they were feared by the ruling class as socially explosive. The Europe-wide anti-immigrant offensive was exemplified by the 1995 Schengen accord aimed at keeping Slavic and dark-skinned immigrants out of “Fortress Europe.”

If fascist terror against immigrants is not now rampant in France, it is only because the popular-front government is carrying out the kind of program of cop terror and deportations that has been the fascists’ rallying cry. The popular front helped make Le Pen’s racist program “respectable.”

The prevailing outlook motivating the demonstrations against Le Pen is the illusion that class conflict can be resolved on the parliamentary plane. Yet the democratic rights that exist in capitalist society—from voting rights and the right to abortion to the right to organize a party or a trade union—were not granted by wise rulers after counting the votes of an undifferentiated electorate. These rights were won in struggle and must be defended through proletarian class struggle.

The events that led to the present blind alley of French bourgeois “democracy” were prepared by the explosive 1995 strike wave by railway workers and other public employees against anti-labor attacks. At the time, the LTF insisted that the heavily minority private sector workers be mobilized in that proletarian struggle and uniquely called on the labor movement to champion the rights of all the oppressed, particularly France’s large North African population. Instead, the trade-union misleaders deflected that class battle from the factories and streets into a campaign to replace the right-wing government then in power by Jospin’s popular front. As is the case with all popular fronts, the politics of class collaboration disoriented the workers, derailed their struggles and emboldened the forces of reaction.

Fake-left groups like the LCR and LO encourage the widespread illusion that there is no alternative to the trap of bourgeois democracy. The LCR Political Bureau declared: “The LCR is mobilizing for Le Pen to get the smallest vote possible on May 5” (Rouge, 25 April). This is a clear call to vote for Chirac. The LCR’s presidential candidate, Olivier Besancenot, called to “stop Le Pen in the streets and at the polls” (Libération, 26 April). “That translates into voting against Le Pen,” declared an April 28 LCR Central Committee statement. LO, on the other hand, comes out clearly against voting Chirac but then leaves open the door to...voting for Chirac. LO members at the April 27 demonstration carried placards reading, “Neither Le Pen nor Chirac.” The next day, LO presidential candidate Arlette Laguiller declared: “I do not call for a vote to Chirac” (Le Monde, 30 April). A couple of days before, however, she said that “each person must make the choice that seems justified to themselves” (Lutte Ouvrière, 26 April).

In the lead-up to last week’s elections, the LTF published an open letter to LO which noted that despite LO’s attempt to draw a crude class line against the popular-front government, its silence on the brutal Vigipirate campaign and its support to reactionary police “strikes” made it impossible for the LTF to give LO critical support. The LTF declared: “LO’s speeches on immigrant rights and their participation in demonstrations for undocumented immigrants are nullified by their silence on Vigipirate and their support to the cop mobilizations. Indifference to racial oppression is the direct consequence of a perspective of class collaboration” (see Workers Vanguard No. 778, 5 April). Now they are proving it by waffling on voting for Chirac.

We publish below a 23 April statement translated from the LTF’s Le Bolchévik No. 159 (Spring 2002).

We must draw the lessons from the April 21 elections. It’s the politics of Chirac, Jospin, Robert Hue and even the so-called “far left” which paved the way for the fascists by making the campaign for “security,” in other words racist repression above all against youth of North African origin, the central theme of the presidential election. Today Lutte Ouvrière and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire seek to cover themselves by blaming the government’s racist politics for this outcome. But where were they? LO hailed the reactionary cop demonstrations of last November and refuses to oppose Vigipirate, which in France after September 11 has represented the reality of the “war against terrorism” that targets all immigrants, and behind them the workers movement and all the oppressed. As for the LCR, how can a party that prettifies French imperialism, going so far as to call for it to intervene militarily everywhere—from the Balkans in 1999 to Palestine today—combat fascism, which represents French nationalism in its most extreme form?

In this grave situation, the PS, the CP, the Greens, the unions (CGT and CFDT) have raised the call to “block Le Pen” and are calling for voting for Chirac! This is like a doctor who wants to fight the plague with cholera. As for the LCR and LO, we may expect that they will preach the “unity of the left to fight the ultraright” as they put into the saddle for the legislative elections a new popular front (a coalition of workers parties with bourgeois parties for the purpose of running the capitalist state) around the PS, which has been running the racist, capitalist French state for the last five years. Already in 1997 LO called for voting for the PS and CP in the legislative elections everywhere that Le Pen was on the second round, contributing to Jospin’s victory. For us Trotskyists, opposition to class collaboration and the popular front is an essential principle. When the interests of the working class are subordinated to those of the bourgeoisie (and they always are in such coalitions), reaction always wins. Our slogans in these elections are more important than ever for organizing the working class to defend itself and defend all the oppressed: Down with Vigipirate! Down with the security campaign! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Stop the deportations! France, UN: Hands off the Near East!

These elections mark a big upheaval in the French political landscape. Their context is the austerity implemented by the popular-front government: massive layoffs, factory closings, privatizations, attacks on pensions, etc. Since the capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, the European bourgeoisies have installed governments to dismantle piece by piece the “welfare state,” a series of social services and workers’ gains won by bitter struggles. In recent years, governments led by social democrats have been charged with this work in most countries of Europe, thereby preparing the job for the far right which is taking power now, with Haider’s party in the Austrian government and Berlusconi/Fini/Bossi in Italy, for example. And the British Labour Party’s Blair has teamed up with Berlusconi against the workers in struggle.

The working class does not lack the militancy to oppose these attacks, as we saw in December 1995 and more recently with the Marseilles longshoremen (a historically very ethnically integrated layer of the working class) or with the recent general strike in Italy. But the sellout leadership of the reformist parties and unions always diverts these struggles toward parliamentary combinations. For the first time since 1969, the left is not represented in the second round. So much the better that the CP is paying so dearly for its collaboration with Chirac/Jospin. The CP was an enormous obstacle on the road of the class struggle: this party, which saved the French bourgeoisie’s hide in 1936, 1944-47 and May 1968, is only the shadow of its former self. But the CP’s politics of class collaboration has not been defeated politically; LO and the LCR still share the same perspective. On the other hand, part of the CP’s working-class and popular electoral base has turned to the fascists as the only “radical” alternative to the rottenness of Jospin/ Chirac. This election shows that the justified hatred which has built up in the working class for this government of austerity can be exploited by fascist demagogues. This is why the fight against racist oppression is so central to anti-capitalist struggle, as we stressed in our open letter to LO.

Thousands of high school students and others immediately took to the streets throughout France to protest against the fascist Le Pen. Now Le Pen is passing himself off as a “normal candidate.” But make no mistake: he is a real fascist who is for deporting immigrants from France and who organizes bands of thugs to attack youth of immigrant origin. He was a torturer during the Algerian War. While in recent months there was hardly anything in the press about the fascists, that’s because the cops themselves directly are carrying out the roundups and racist repression. We’ve been hearing a lot about the “anti-Semitism of the Maghrebians” recently, because that’s a pretext for the repression in the ghettos. But it’s not the Maghrebians who voted for Le Pen, who declared that the Holocaust of the Jews was just a “detail” and who still identifies himself with the Vichy regime.

Le Pen and the fascists don’t represent “bad ideas” that one can debate. Fascism is a program to wipe out the organized workers movement, send women back to the home and massacre “immigrants,” Jews, minorities and homosexuals. The fascists are the extreme expression of the interests of the bourgeoisie and are their reserve army against the proletariat. That’s why the fight against fascism has to be linked to the struggle against the system of capitalist exploitation. Le Pen isn’t on the verge of taking power in this country, but his election score will be translated into an augmentation of racist crimes in the streets. Smash the fascists before they smash us! For worker/ immigrant self-defense groups based on the factories!

In 1995 the National Front launched its electoral campaign by assassinating Ibrahim Ali and “celebrated” its showing by killing Brahim Bouraam on May Day. Le Pen’s call for an FN mobilization on May Day [this year], the international day of the working class, is a sinister provocation. What’s necessary is mass mobilizations to repulse this danger. As Trotsky wrote (“Germany, the Key to the International Situation,” 26 November 1931):

“On the scales of electoral statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand communist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater.”

But instead of mobilizing the working class to sweep the fascists off the streets on May Day, the fake left uses the anger of the youth and of all the opponents of the fascists to refurbish not only the social democrats but even Chirac! The “CGT police union” just called for “all republican policemen to participate in all demonstrations organized by the forces of progress.” In fact, the cop “unions” would be the organic support for a fascist regime. We say: Cops out of the unions!

The anger at the election results is cynically manipulated by the LCR of Krivine/ Besancenot. Laguiller announced the evening after the elections that they aren’t going to vote for Chirac on the second round, but in their editorial yesterday they are already much more evasive, refusing to clearly state who to vote for: “Everyone must make their own choice.” As for the LCR, they go in for empty talk about a “third round” with social struggle in the streets “against fascism and the bosses” (leaflet of the LCR’s youth group). With the French army of the Algerian War as an “international protection force” in Palestine? With “union rights and the right to strike for the police” (Rouge, 13 December 2001)? Their capitulation to bourgeois triumphalism and the ideological anti-communist campaign was expressed in the campaign of Besancenot, who prated about “democracy” and denounced the organizer of the socialist revolution of October 1917, Leon Trotsky, by saying about him (Le Monde, 11 April): “It’s not certain he would have been much better than Stalin.” Stalin was the gravedigger of the Russian Revolution!

The disaster of parliamentarism could also benefit the anarchists. Quite a few youth with good impulses reject parliamentary cretinism. But more than ever in the climate of the “death of communism” after the capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, they are hostile to the very idea that struggles need leadership, and they reject the leading revolutionary role of the working class. As Trotsky said, in reactionary periods there are “monstrous ideological relapses” and “senile thought seems to have become infantile.” The numerous spontaneous demonstrations are not sufficient to wipe out the gangrene of racism and fascism, and the capitalists’ and social-democrats’ attacks on the working class. It’s necessary to have the perspective of a workers revolution to sweep away the whole capitalist system. The working class, which produces the wealth of society, draws its power from its role in production; it must lead the struggles of all the oppressed against this rotten capitalist system. But for that the working class needs a new leadership, which we are determined to build.