French Elections:

Trotskyists Give Critical Support to Gauche Révolutionnaire

reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 826, 14 May 2004.

The French regional and local elections of March 28 were a major setback for conservative president Jacques Chirac. In a clear plebiscite against the government’s racist, anti-working-class policies, all regions of the country except Alsace and Corsica were won by coalitions led by the opposition Socialist Party. The electoral defeat came despite attempts by Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, to restore “national unity” by whipping up “anti-terrorist” hysteria. In the wake of the terrorist bombings in Madrid, they ratcheted up Vigipirate, a campaign of racist cop terror against dark-skinned workers and deportation of undocumented immigrants, to a higher level than even in the period following September 11. But it didn’t work.

Two years ago, neo-Gaullist Chirac was elected president with the support not only of the right-wing parties but also the Socialist Party (PS), the Communist Party (PCF) and even Alain Krivine’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR). They lined up behind Chirac, supposedly to prevent the election of the other second-round candidate, the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Subsequently, these same organizations signed a call for a demonstration on 14 December 2002 against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which promoted unity with Chirac against George Bush by declaring: “The French authorities and the parliament must use all available means to prevent a war against Iraq.” The Chirac government was strengthened by such political support as it waged a campaign to slash retirement benefits for public employees.

Last October, the LCR and Lutte Ouvrière (LO), another group falsely claiming to be Trotskyist, spearheaded the expulsion from high school of Alma and Lila Lévy for wearing the Islamic headscarf. This helped pave the way for Chirac’s racist law banning young women in headscarves from the schools. On March 6, two weeks before the first round of the local and regional elections, LO spokeswoman Arlette Laguiller demonstrated in Paris “against the headscarf at school” side by side with Socialist Party bigwig Jack Lang and Corinne Lepage, the head of Chirac’s electoral slate in Paris. The Ligue Trotskyste de France (LTF), section of the International Communist League, has forthrightly opposed the headscarf as a symbol of the oppression of women while campaigning against the racist expulsions which fuel racial divisions in the working class.

Behind the electoral defeat of the Chirac government lies the danger of a new class-collaborationist alliance between the PS, the PCF and bourgeois forces like the Greens and the ultra-nationalists led by Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The goal of such a popular-front alliance would be to set up a capitalist government like the one in power from 1997 to 2002 under Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, whose anti-immigrant and anti-working-class attacks prepared the way for the current right-wing government.

In the recent local elections, the LTF gave critical support to the Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR—Revolutionary Left), the French affiliate of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), which presented a candidate in the Rouen 5th canton [municipal district]. The GR took a clear position against the racist headscarf campaign and drew a crude class line by running against the out-of-power popular front and independently of the LCR and LO. The LTF offered to distribute the GR’s electoral leaflet and to give them a financial contribution of 50 euros, but the GR leadership rejected both proposals. So the LTF in Rouen distributed hundreds of our own campaign leaflets at the local university campus and at a March 20 demonstration on the eve of the elections. We are gratified that the GR obtained a respectable 184 votes, 4 percent of the votes cast.

The GR in France adopts a profile which is to the left of most of their sister organizations in the CWI. With a former member of the LTF in its leadership and based in Rouen, a city where the LTF is well known, the GR is constrained to occupy a slot between the Trotskyism of the LTF and the crass opportunism of the LCR and LO. Thus, while a hallmark of the Taaffeites internationally is their position that cops are “workers in uniform,” the GR was the only group in France, besides the LTF, that did not support the police “strike” (more accurately, riots) in November 2001 against the Guigou law introducing the legal presumption of innocence. At their recent day school in Rouen, it was a cadre of their Belgian group who defended the Taaffeite line on the police, much to the dismay of their younger members and to the embarrassment of their French cadre, who sat in stony silence. Challenged on the Taaffeites’ refusal to call for the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland, the response was...further silence.

Seeking to capitalize on the fact that the PS and PCF are today so discredited, the GR prates about the need for “a new workers party,” but what they are talking about is explicitly not a revolutionary party. GR members never fail in private discussions to label the LCR and LO as “reformists,” but GR sees these same parties as central to its new “workers party.” While standing independently in the local elections, GR ran in the regional elections on the LO-LCR electoral slates—criticizing them for limiting themselves to an electoral alliance and not committing themselves to building a new party. Meanwhile, if the GR in France calls for building a non-revolutionary “workers party,” their Taaffeite comrades in the U.S. support the bourgeois candidate Ralph Nader!

The GR justifies their perspective of building a revolutionary party in stages by citing Leon Trotsky’s 1938 call for a labor party in the U.S. This is a blatant falsification. For Trotsky, the labor party slogan was not an alternative to building a communist vanguard party, but a means of furthering that task. The demand on the union bureaucracy (or a section of it) to form a labor party was raised in a particular historical context: the economic crisis, the great strikes in the mid 1930s and the formation of the CIO industrial unions. Trotsky argued that the mass industrial unions, defensive organizations of the working class, were clearly confronted with the need for independent political action. At the same time, he underlined that the labor party slogan was inseparable from the fight for a revolutionary program:

“Are we in favor of the creation of a reformist labor party? No....

“It can become a reformist party—it depends upon the development. Here comes in the question of program. I mentioned yesterday and I will underline it today—we must have a program of transitional demands, the most complete of them is a workers’ and farmers’ government. We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state.”

— “Discussion in Mexico City” (April 1938), in Leon Trotsky on the Labor Party in the United States

One can see in Brazil what the GR’s perspective for a “workers party” comes down to: their Brazilian comrades of Socialismo Revolucionario were for a long time buried in Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT—Workers Party), including during the first year of the PT’s participation in the capitalist government. The GR criticizes the LCR because Miguel Rossetto, a member of the USec’s Brazilian affiliate, participated in Lula’s government as minister for agrarian development. But the GR hailed Lula’s election as a “first victory” (L’Egalité No. 99, January-February 2003). The GR now claims that its Brazilian comrades have joined the Democratic and Socialist Movement for a New Party whose aim is to build a new workers party. This “new” PT, whose most well-known leader is Heloísa Helena, seeks to “reclaim” the traditions of the old PT which, from 1989 to 2002, ran four times in the presidential elections in a political bloc with bourgeois candidates. So much for the GR’s supposed struggle for “class independence.”

We reprint below the LTF’s election leaflet entitled: “No Vote to LO/LCR in the Regional Elections! 5th Canton of Rouen: Vote for Leïla Messaoudi of the Gauche Révolutionnaire!”

ROUEN, March 11—In the canton-level elections for Rouen’s 5th canton, the Ligue Trotskyste de France calls for a vote to Leïla Messaoudi, candidate of the Gauche Révolutionnaire. The issues raised by the GR’s campaign address the felt needs and problems of workers: “Real jobs, decent housing, quality public services!” The racist terror, poverty and massive unemployment that are hitting hardest at the ghettoized public housing complexes like Hauts de Rouen are an outgrowth of the attacks of the Chirac/Raffarin/Sarkozy government—themselves continuing the dirty work of the last capitalist government composed of the Socialist Party, Communist Party and Greens. A vote for the GR represents in a crude way a vote for class independence because they are running on their own, against the candidates of the PS and PCF which for 20 years have been making class-collaborationist alliances with bourgeois parties like the Greens or the Chevènementists. Also, the GR has a correct line of opposing the racist expulsions of young women who wear headscarves, even though they don’t mention this in their campaign leaflet.

In contrast, we call for a sound rebuff to LO and the LCR by rejecting any vote for their slates in the regiona l elections (including in Haute-Normandie where the GR has two representatives), because of their support for the expulsions of young women who wear headscarves. LO and the LCR, in spite of their professed opposition to the ex-“Plural Left” of Jospin, the Greens and the PCF, are in fact the ones who have spearheaded the racist campaign to expel young women wearing the headscarf (even though the LCR opposes the law): in Aubervilliers last September, LO and LCR members who are teachers actively led the fight to expel Alma and Lila Lévy! We of the LTF oppose the racist Chirac law against the headscarf, and we defend the right of Alma, Lila and all young women who wear headscarves to go to public school. At the same time, as communists, we oppose the headscarf and the veil which represent a reactionary social program to confine women within the family, inside the house and in a position of servitude. As we put forward on our banner at the February 14 demonstration: “No to the racist law against youth wearing headscarves! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!”

This campaign against young women wearing headscarves is particularly crucial for deflecting the workers’ anger at the government, because it lends itself to the racist lie that the real problem in this country is supposedly not the racist capitalist system but young women wearing the headscarf, and dark-skinned youth in general. You can’t purport to oppose the racist, capitalist government without opposing its campaign against young women in headscarves. It’s a bourgeois campaign that aims to divide and conquer, by assaulting the rights of the most vulnerable layers of society to pave the way to attacking the whole working class. It is necessary to oppose racist terror and break with the reformist traitors of the PS, PCF, LCR and LO who for years have been tying the workers to Chirac and the French bourgeoisie in one way or another. The LCR criminally called for a vote to Chirac against Le Pen in the 2002 presidential elections! And LO is so tied to the coattails of the government on the question of the headscarf that on March 6 we saw Arlette Laguiller arm in arm with Fadela Amara (of the organization Ni Putes Ni Soumises—Neither Sluts nor Slaves) and Nicole Guedj (Secretary of State for prison construction from Chirac’s party)!

Far from having a perspective of leading workers into breaking with the opportunists in the workers movement, the GR aspires quite to the contrary to unity with them, and they explicitly place their participation in the LO/LCR regional slate within this framework, saying that “we must not stop with an electoral alliance.” In the January-February L’Egalité they give expression to this in a polemic against LO:

“LO tenaciously holds to its program, refusing to conceive of a future workers party other than as a ‘revolutionary communist party.’ Of course if such a party were formed we would fight for its program to be revolutionary. But we wouldn’t make it a precondition for our participation in a workers party if we can get agreement on a platform based on an anti-capitalist orientation and defending workers’ demands.”

With this conception of the party, their comrades spent several decades inside the Labour Party in Britain. This conception, the opposite of Lenin’s, reflects in fact their reformism. The various instances of support to Chirac by the CP, LO and LCR of the last couple years demonstrate forcefully that an alliance with these opportunists leads not to the revolutionary unity of the proletariat but to its division and subjugation by the bourgeoisie. Lenin understood that what is required is a revolutionary party separate from the reformists and opportunists in the workers movement, i.e., separate from those who want to tie the workers and oppressed to the capitalist system. We fight to accomplish the task that Lenin and Trotsky began by leading the working class to victory in Russia in October of 1917: leading the class struggle to its victorious conclusion with state power in the hands of workers councils all over the world. Only a socialist revolution can sweep away this capitalist system of racism, unemployment and war.

Although we have fundamental political differences with the GR, their candidacy represents a vote for class independence and we call for critical support in the elections in Rouen’s 5th canton. On March 21, vote for Leïla Messaoudi of the GR!