French Trotskyists Say:

Down With Racist "First Employment" Law! Defend Ghetto Youth!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a translation of a March 15 supplement of Le Bolchévik, newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League.

State repression and intimidation of demonstrators protesting the First Employment Contract (CPE) grow more intense every day, with a growing number of arrests. Freedom now for all protesters! Drop all charges! The riot cops are tear-gassing and beating students, just as the state last November went after the youth of African and North African origin from the working-class districts who revolted against daily racist oppression and the death at the hands of the cops of two youth fleeing a police checkpoint in Clichy-sous-Bois. For these youth as well we demand they be immediately freed and all charges dropped!

The CPE would impose a two-tier system for workers, with a probation period of two years for those under 26 years old. Young workers, whatever their social or ethnic origins, will find themselves at the mercy of their employers: if just once they refuse to work overtime, if just once they go on strike or are seen discussing with a union activist, if they get pregnant, and so on, they are likely to be shown the door. This measure seeks to weaken the union movement even more and to prepare new attacks targeting all workers. That’s why the whole working class has a direct stake in beating back this new attack.

The first targets of the CPE are the suburban ghetto youth who already experience massive unemployment, permanent racist segregation in hiring, education and housing, and constant cop harassment. The so-called “equal opportunities” law, of which the CPE is just one component, also anticipates suspending if not eliminating the family allowance for parents of youth who skip school or “because of any other difficulty linked to inadequate parental authority.” In other words, this law targets the poorest layers of the population, especially those of working-class origins and most particularly families headed by single parents of immigrant origin. [Prime Minister Dominique] de Villepin said as much in his TV interview on March 12, seeking to appease the students and more generally to divide the youth by saying that this measure is aimed at the unemployed ghetto youth and that (white) students, with their qualifications, will continue (?!) to receive permanent contracts. Down with the CPE! Down with the racist “equal opportunities” law! Down with the racist Vigipirate police checks! The workers movement must defend the ghetto youth!

The CPE is all about undermining the integrity of the working class by reinforcing the divisions between young and old and between dark-skinned youth of non-European origin and those of European origin. It’s an attempt to manipulate youth, especially those from the ghettos, against the trade unions themselves. To repel this attack, the workers movement must overcome the narrow limits of trade unionism and confront head-on the special oppression of immigrants and of French-born youth of North African and African origin. The workers movement must fight racist segregation in housing, education and hiring. For the division of all the work among all workers, without loss in pay, on permanent contracts! Not only is the capitalist system incapable of resolving unemployment, but it is the system itself that produces a layer of the permanently unemployed in order to increase the exploitation of all workers. Any serious struggle on this question poses the question of overthrowing the whole capitalist system by workers revolution.

The union leaders and the social democrats—mostly the Socialist Party (PS) but also the Communist Party (PCF)—oppose the CPE, while also trying to put a brake on workers’ strike actions. That’s why the second major union mobilization was called for March 18, a Saturday. But back in November, these same union bureaucrats didn’t lift their little finger to defend the youth under siege in the ghettos. As for the PS and PCF, at the height of the revolt, they were calling for the bourgeois state to “re-establish order,” with the PS even openly supporting the “state of emergency” in order to defend “their” republic. So now when these same misleaders angrily decry [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy/de Villepin’s anti-youth attacks and the government’s sending in of the riot police against student protesters, it only serves to underline once again their gross hypocrisy and opportunism and their conciliation of racist oppression. In fact it was their support to the government against the ghetto youth revolt that emboldened de Villepin to launch his CPE and “unequal opportunities” law in January.

Behind the social-democratic leaders’ anti-CPE radicalism are of course their electoral ambitions for 2007. At last they see a way to try and wipe out the memory of [PS prime minister Lionel] Jospin’s “Plural Left,” the previous popular-front government (that is, a government of the PS and PCF together with small bourgeois parties like the Chevènementists, the Left Radicals and Greens). It was Jospin’s “Plural Left” that last time around introduced its own brand of minimum-wage youth jobs, put in place the university “reform” and re-launched the racist Vigipirate identity checks. The social democrats, especially the PCF, peddle the lie that they have supposedly learned their lesson, and if they are elected they’ll be out there defending the interests of workers, immigrants and youth. But administering the capitalist system means first and foremost defending the interests of their “own” bourgeoisie and its rate of profit against foreign capitalist rivals—which means heightened exploitation of workers and more oppression at home, in the ex-colonies, in East Europe and beyond.

The students must turn to the working class. They should place no confidence in the anti-CPE proclamations of some university presidents, who carry out their ministerial directives to cut budgets, lay off workers and privatize the auxiliary services [cafeterias, cleaning]; they hire campus security and call in the cops, etc. Students’ potential allies on campus are not the university presidents who represent the capitalists, but the campus workers and teachers. Capitalism isn’t a set of policies from which its rulers can pick and choose; it’s a system rooted in the exploitation of one class by another, and the ruling class wields its riot cops, its courts and prisons to try and ensure that this relationship of forces remains in effect. The role of the universities is to train the next generation of ideologues and administrators to run the capitalist system. Students have the choice to either conform—or to rally to the cause of socialist revolution.

The CPE is the latest in a line of anti-worker, anti-youth attacks, and it must be defeated. But even if it were, the capitalists would take the offensive again with new attacks. To finish once and for all with such “flexibility” measures, intrinsic to capitalism, it’s the system itself which must be destroyed. We are fighting to build a revolutionary workers party—multiethnic and internationalist—whose goal is to lead the working class in socialist revolution. And that means combatting the politics of those, including the many student activists amongst the Communist Youth and the UNEF student federation, who spout their “fight the right” rhetoric today to pave the way tomorrow to yet another capitalist popular-front government led by the PS and PCF.

In May ’68, the students’ actions sparked a three-week workers general strike, mobilizing millions of workers in the streets, but also importantly at first, in factory occupations. It was those strikes and factory occupations which shook up the ruling class not only here in France but across the world. But in the absence of a revolutionary party, the strikes were demobilized and betrayed, chiefly by the Stalinist Communist Party which, thanks to its influence within the working class, was ultimately able to save the skin of the French bourgeoisie.

But today is not 1968. Now that the degenerated Soviet workers state was destroyed in 1991-1992, the capitalists around the world are stepping up their offensive to demolish workers’ gains, including those achieved in the wake of May ’68, with the CPE being just one attack in the generalized onslaught to increase the French capitalists’ levels of profit as against their rivals. The counterrevolution in the former USSR has brought with it an enormous political demoralization of the workers, reinforced in France by the years of capitalist austerity governments headed by popular fronts (Mitterrand, Jospin), so that the working class currently does not see revolutionary socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism.

It wasn’t communism, but its parody, Stalinism, which arrived at a dead end. Despite its Stalinist degeneration, we defended the Soviet Union against imperialism and counterrevolution; we fought for a proletarian political revolution to throw out the Stalinist bureaucracy. For example, in East Germany in late 1989 and early 1990, we threw all our forces into fighting for a Red Germany of workers councils, in East and West Germany, and against capitalist reunification. This was counterposed to the role played by the so-called “leftists” of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), Lutte Ouvrière (LO), etc., who supported the counterrevolution and who now whine about the CPE and other consequences of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union.

To break the vicious circle of capitalist governments of the right wing and of the popular front, it’s necessary to break with the reformists and expose these traitors. Instead, the so-called “far left” LCR spends its time trying to organize joint meetings and other unconditional proposals of “unity in struggle” with the likes of [PS head] Hollande and [PCF head] Buffet. On March 11, right after the cop attack on the Sorbonne, [LCR leader] Besancenot again appealed to these same forces: “The youth mobilized against the CPE need the support and the solidarity of all the forces of the left, notably against the high-handedness and intransigence of the government. We propose a meeting, at the earliest opportunity, to prepare a united fight back against these latest government attacks.” The LCR’s crawling before the PS and other “left forces,” such as the bourgeois Chevènementists, in hopes of making them more combative can only fuel the worst illusions that the working class and militant youth have in the social-democratic traitors, and give a left cover to their ambitions to take advantage of the anti-CPE campaign for the 2007 elections. The price of the LCR’s appeal for unity with the PS & Co. today is to disappear the racist character of the “unequal opportunities law” and the fact that its main target is immigrant-derived and working-class youth in the ghettos.

Today the LCR works for the next PS-PCF government, but in April-May 2002, they used their influence in the massive multiethnic demonstrations of youth against [fascist demagogue] Le Pen to call for a vote to [President] Chirac. Thus they bear a share of responsibility for this reactionary right-wing government. LO opposed voting for Chirac, but their support to the racist law on the [Muslim] headscarf and their narrow economist intervention into the working class facilitate the attacks of Chirac, de Villepin and Sarkozy. These reformist organizations cannot struggle against racist oppression, much less lead the working class toward its social emancipation, because their whole perspective is based on class collaboration.

A revolutionary workers party would combat such class collaboration. A revolutionary leadership of the unions would be seeking to mobilize the working class of this country against the CPE and the police repression of demonstrators. The working class is the source of all the profits that the capitalist class seizes for itself, and when the workers stop work and go on strike, they have the power to shut down production and to stop the flow of profit. Through the defensive class struggles in West Europe and in other parts of the world, Marxism—the theory of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution—must again become understood and accepted as its own by the working class. We struggle to build international revolutionary workers parties to lead the workers to new victorious revolutions, as in October 1917 in Russia.