France: Fake Left Backs Chirac

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

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No.781, 17 May 2002

MAY 13—Conservative French president Jacques Chirac celebrated his re-election last Sunday by declaring that his first order of business would be stepped up “security,” a code word for racist cop terror against minorities. The election offered voters a pernicious “choice” between the racist Chirac and the outright fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front (FN). It was like being asked to choose between smallpox and cholera! Yet virtually the entire left rallied behind Chirac as a supposed champion of “Republican values,” forming a reactionary national front that extended from the Gaullist right to the “far left.”

Far from being a bulwark against the extreme right, this broad spectrum of support for Chirac—and his 82 percent of the vote—will only lead to even more severe state repression against workers and all the oppressed. Chirac’s “thank you” for the support he got from the “left” was to immediately intensify the Vigipirate campaign of cop terror, dramatically expanding subway “identity checks” of blacks and North Africans (Maghrebins) and moving to reinforce police squads by 40 percent in the Paris subway system. He is also shutting down the Sangatte camp for asylum-seekers near the English Channel. During the campaign, Le Pen vowed to load the Sangatte immigrants on a special train—evoking the Nazi deportations of Jews to the death camps during World War II—and ship them to Blair’s Britain. Now Chirac is moving to get rid of them and ship them anywhere. This is what the “left” voted for in its hysterical campaign to stop Le Pen!

The election was preceded by almost daily mass demonstrations throughout the country in which hundreds of thousands of mainly young protesters expressed their outrage that a fascist had made it to the second round of the presidential ballot. Practically the entire left, from the Socialist Party (PS) and Communist Party (PCF) to the fake-Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), pitched in to help channel that explosion of anger into getting out the vote for the rightist Chirac. It was the popular-front government—led by the PS and including the PCF and the bourgeois Greens—that prepared the way for Le Pen’s electoral gains. From the mass expulsion of immigrants to Vigipirate, the popular front’s racist attacks helped make Le Pen’s venomous rantings “respectable.”

The first round of the elections represented a stinging repudiation of the popular-front government. Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin promptly announced his resignation. Now, with parliamentary elections scheduled for next month, the “choice” being offered voters is whether it will be the right or the “left” that carries out more racist attacks and anti-working-class austerity. The electoral campaign is already centered on the same racist themes of “crime” and “security” that dominated the presidential elections.

Meanwhile, the opportunist LCR is riding high, as the bourgeois press touts them as responsible far leftists who rallied support to vote Chirac and save the Republic. Voting Chirac was the LCR’s hoped-for entry card into the “United Left,” the new name of the PS-led class-collaborationist coalition for the parliamentary elections. The LCR was reportedly granted a seat in the back-room horse trading aimed at cobbling together this new coalition—a process that LCR leader Alain Krivine calls “the reconstruction on the left” (Libération, 4 May).

Having helped make Chirac master of the house, as soon as the polls closed the LCR staged a rally at Place de la Bastille, joined by the PS, to begin organizing against Chirac! LCR presidential candidate Olivier Besancenot put on a militant face, declaring: “As in Italy, we need to prepare a general strike.” Such prattle is nothing but a cynical attempt to maneuver workers into electing a new popular-front coalition. Meanwhile, the anarchist CNT and the Anarchist Federation (FA) were also very much part of the “stop Le Pen” (read: vote Chirac) swamp—despite all their talk, this time in the small print, against elections. The FA carried a banner in the Paris May Day demonstration that was at best ambiguous and at worst social-chauvinist, which read: “French/Immigrants: Our Country Is Liberty and Equality!” “Our country”?!

The LCR likewise prettifies imperialist France as a bastion of liberty and equality, appealing for French military intervention in the Near East and the Balkans. Besancenot refused even to defend soccer players from Corsica, long oppressed and persecuted by France, against a chauvinist tirade by Chirac because they jeered the French national anthem at a May 11 match. “I don’t know if one can jeer La Marseillaise in the French Stadium,” Besancenot told Le Monde (15 May), “but in any case one has the right to boo Jacques Chirac.”

As the immediate “vote Chirac” frenzy subsides, a lot of workers and minorities will rightly blame those who stampeded them into voting for Chirac. Lutte Ouvrière (LO), an ostensibly Trotskyist organization which resisted the pressure to call for a vote to this rightist—for which it was reviled, hissed and booed—could be well positioned to make gains.

In the lead-up to the first round, our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France issued a 10 March open letter to LO (WV No. 778, 5 April), which recognized that its presidential campaign sought to draw a crude class line against the Jospin popular front. At the same time, we explained why LO did not warrant even the most critical electoral support:

“LO does not oppose the government because they are opposed to class collaboration: they empty their correct opposition of all its content by their tacit support to Vigipirate and their explicit support to the reactionary mobilizations of cops in November.... LO’s refusal to fight against Vigipirate represents a loyalty oath to the racist bourgeois order and to the anti-working-class austerity of the Jospin government. But if, in its campaign, LO came out clearly against Vigipirate and the cop terror, we would envision calling for voting for LO, without muting our criticisms of their program.”

Only after the election has LO “discovered” that the policies of the Jospin government—which LO helped put in office—were racist and paved the way for Le Pen.

LO’s main emphasis going into the second round was to appeal to workers who had voted for Le Pen on the first round not to do so again. But in capitulating to the Jospin government’s Vigipirate/ “security” campaign, LO aided the popular front in driving backward workers into the arms of reaction. This election was a clear demonstration of how, in the absence of a credible left opposition to popular-front austerity and racist attacks, more backward sections of the working class can be attracted to “radical” right-wing demagogues. That underlines why the fight against racist oppression is so central to anti-capitalist struggle. Yet LO’s timeworn practice is to capitulate to the existing level of consciousness of the working class rather than struggle against racist, sexist and anti-gay bigotry.

The centrist Internationalist Group (IG), a small clot of defectors from the revolutionary Trotskyism of the International Communist League, struck an ultra-militant posture over the French elections, thundering (in bold print) in a 26 April leaflet that it was “necessary to mobilize the power of the working class to boycott the electoral circus of the bourgeoisie” through “demonstrations and workers strikes” on the day of the vote. Interestingly, the “boycott” line was also promoted by the cyberspace political bandits of David North’s World Socialist Web Site (29 April), who are past masters at cynical posturing to camouflage their opportunist appetites. The IG is no less cynical. For the working class to boycott bourgeois elections presupposes a level of class consciousness one would expect in a pre-revolutionary situation posing the question of state power. But the IG’s call came as over one and a half million people, including large numbers of workers, were demonstrating in the streets in support of the bourgeois “Republic”—and the rightist Chirac!

The IG’s macho phrasemongering is simply a smokescreen for its fundamentally opportunist politics, posturing as the militant in-the-streets wing of the anti-fascist electoral “unity” pushed by the French left in the tow of the popular front. While admitting in passing (in a 4 May statement) that “Le Pen is not about to take power,” the IG’s articles on the French elections are full of the same “fascism is around the corner” rhetoric that the PS, PCF, LCR et al. used to justify “unity” behind Chirac. In its 4 May statement, the IG draws an analogy with the 1932 election of Hindenburg as German chancellor, who handed over power to Hitler a year later. But by the early 1930s, Hitler had 100,000 stormtroopers on the street terrorizing Jews and attacking trade-union and leftist meetings. Since the French proletariat does not currently pose an immediate threat to the bourgeois order, the capitalists are not about to resort to fascist dictatorship. While Le Pen’s gains at the polls will certainly embolden his fascist thugs, the FN’s success is an electoral phenomenon.

This same question came up two years ago when Jörg Haider’s openly racist Freedom Party (FPÖ) entered a coalition with the right-wing People’s Party (ÖVP) in Austria. Social democrats across Europe, screaming that Austria was on the verge of a fascist takeover, mobilized to pressure the ÖVP to kick out Haider and reinstate its longstanding coalition with the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ). While noting that Haider’s political outlook is indeed fascistic, we wrote at the time: “In a situation in which there are no fascist mobilizations in the streets and the main question is the participation of the FPÖ in the government, the slogans ‘Stop Haider,’ ‘Strike Now’ can only be a call for extraparliamentary action for a new parliamentary coalition, that is, a ‘more militant’ call to replace the FPÖ with the SPÖ” (WV No. 730, 25 February 2000).

Then, too, the IG posed as the militant voice of anti-fascist unity. Denouncing us for “lulling the masses,” the IG devoted 20 pages of its Internationalist (June 2000) to “proving” that Haider’s FPÖ is fascist. So does the IG think Austria is fascist today? Have the unions been crushed, political parties driven underground, concentration camps set up? The complete annihilation of the organized workers movement—that is what fascism means, not the election of an ultra-rightist within a bourgeois-democratic framework.

In weaving its pseudo-revolutionary fantasies, the IG seeks to deny the very real obstacles that stand in the way of forging a revolutionary party. Thus it simply equates LO and the LCR, falsely claiming that both are “organizing extraparliamentary support for the ‘Republican front’ for Chirac” (26 April) and “openly or tacitly, encouraged a vote for Chirac in the second round” (4 May). In an earlier posting on its Web site (14 April), the IG lyingly denounced our open letter for supposedly granting “conditional critical support” to LO, and instead simply dismissed LO because it has “applauded bonapartist and racist police demonstrations.” We seek to win militants who are drawn to LO on the basis of its stated opposition to the popular front by exposing how that is contradicted by its tacit support to Vigipirate. Where the IG aims only to be the “militant” tail of whatever’s in motion, we engage in clear and honest programmatic struggle because our aim is to build a conscious proletarian vanguard party on the basis of the Trotskyist program.

For the French bourgeoisie, Le Pen’s score in the elections—and the popular rallying around the tricolor orchestrated by the reformist parties—was a godsend. Faced with a significant level of labor struggle in response to unemployment and attacks on social benefits, the ruling classes of Europe seek to portray themselves as the democratic representatives of the whole people. The more they can submerge class consciousness under a barrage of “national unity,” the easier it will be for them to launch imperialist military adventures abroad and attacks on the working class and minorities at home. Against the reformist misleaders who chain the workers to the capitalist order, we Trotskyists fight for the class independence the proletariat needs to resist the attacks of the bourgeoisie. And we will not let the working class forget the miserable leftists who rallied to the defense of the imperialist “French republic.”