On The 50th Anniversary Of The May Day In France-From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard- "France, May 1968"-Drawing The Lessons

Markin comment on this article:

I have noted before (as have others as well) that we in the West, meaning West Europe and the United States mainly, have had precious few serious opportunities to pose the question of workers’ power since the time of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. In the immediate post-World War II period, the May 1968 events detailed here, and for a while in Portugal in the mid-1970s and that is about it. Thus, the lessons of those named events loom very large in our “lessons” book, especially the May 1968 events which are an almost chemically pure example of how the Stalinists (and the social democracy) cravenly acted, well, acted as they always did as a force for breaking the back of a very good revolutionary opportunity. Now, by 1968, the reformist (or worst) qualities of Stalinism and social democracy were widely know on the let so I would suggest that particular attention be paid to what those non-doctrine student radicals, anarchists of various stripes, Maoists of various stripes, and Trotskyists of various stripes did, or didn’t do, in reaction to the pro-Soviet Stalinist French Communist Party and pro- imperialist Socialist Party.

Note: One of the conditions that almost pre-determines a pre-revolutionary situation as here, although certainly not the only condition, is that the old regime (here the Gaullists) could not longer rule in the old way. The litmus test, however, and it has come up in various settings in the past (most notably in Spain in 1936-early 1937), is at that moment when the old regime almost dares the radicals and revolutionaries to take power (posed as taking on the headache of power in some egregious circumstances where the old regime has created a “blind alley”) and the radicals and revolutionaries, or rather their leaderships “flinch.” Let us learn the lesson of not flinching, and of acting like 1917 Bolsheviks on those rare, too rare occasions, when the question of workers' power is posed.
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Workers Vanguard No. 972
21 January 2010

France, May 1968

Prerevolutionary Situation Betrayed by Communist Party

Part One

(Young Spartacus pages)

Inspired by struggles around the world, the student protests for more social freedom that began in early 1968 in the Paris suburb of Nanterre spread rapidly. In Paris on May 10, pitched battles with the police left hundreds of protesters (and policemen) wounded. In response, on May 13, a general strike shut down all of France; it would grow to include some ten million workers. Seeking to end the strike, the government opened negotiations at Grenelle on May 25. The working class, lacking revolutionary leadership, was unable to put itself forward as a contender for power and returned to work in June. We reprint below the first part of a forum by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France on the fortieth anniversary of the May ’68 events. The forum, which originally appeared in the LTF’s newspaper Le Bolchévik (Nos. 185 and 186, September and December 2008), has been translated and adapted for publication.

* * *

The thirtieth anniversary of May ’68, in 1998, occurred in the shadow of the “death of communism” campaign that followed the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR in 1991-92. So the working class was disappeared from every commentary, article, book, documentary, news report, etc. May-June ’68 was turned into just a big student struggle for sexual freedom and a few other social gains. We wrote in Le Bolchévik No. 147 (Autumn 1998):

“The bourgeois press played up May ’68 as a kind of bourgeois revolution that allowed more sexual freedom. This kind of propaganda has three purposes: exorcising the spectre of social revolution; proclaiming capitalism to be capable of continually ‘renewing’ and ‘democratizing’ itself; and casting an ‘indulgent’ look on the revolutionary ‘unrest’ which is now over and done with.”

In 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of May ’68, we are still feeling the effects of the “death of communism” campaign. The working class has reappeared in books, colloquiums and articles but it is presented as having become harmless, bound to the capitalist system and greatly weakened by the outsourcing made possible by the globalization of the economy.

We want to reaffirm that May-June ’68 was a prerevolutionary situation, the driving force of which was the working class. The power of the working class paralyzed the country and caused the bourgeoisie to shake with fear. What the working class lacked was a revolutionary party capable of tearing the workers away from their treacherous leaders—mainly in the French Communist Party (PCF), which led the CGT trade-union federation—and of raising the consciousness of the working class to understand its historic role in overthrowing capitalism. The French bourgeoisie was able to get by fairly easily in the end because the PCF betrayed the working class. May ’68 was the most recent prerevolutionary situation in this country. But there will be others. For those of us who devote ourselves to preparing to intervene into such a situation in order to turn it into a workers revolution, it is crucial to review these lessons.

The Post-World War II Period

To understand how a social explosion of such importance could have taken place and what a revolutionary party would have done in this situation, we have to understand how different the world was post-World War II, and in the ’60s, from what it is today. These differences are fundamentally due to the counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92 and to the campaign about the supposed “death of communism” (that is, that there can be no alternative to capitalism) that is being waged by the bourgeoisie with the help of reformist “socialists” all over the world, including those who, not so long ago (certainly in May ’68) claimed to be revolutionaries.

Having usurped power in a political counterrevolution beginning in 1924, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR repudiated the very program of proletarian internationalism that had led to the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the program that Trotsky’s Left Opposition continued to defend. The bureaucracy invented the anti-Marxist “theory” of building “socialism in one country” in the search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, for which it betrayed workers and peasants fighting the imperialists all over the world.

But Stalin’s victory did not constitute a social counterrevolution. The property forms created by the October Revolution were not destroyed but remained as gains for the workers of the world. The Trotskyists waged a relentless struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, seeking to oust it through proletarian political revolution. At the same time, they fought tirelessly for the unconditional military defense of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet workers state against imperialism and counterrevolution, with the understanding that the outcome would ultimately be determined by the extension of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the imperialist centers through workers revolutions in those countries.

The post-World War II period was marked by the emergence of bureaucratically deformed workers states in most of the East European countries that were occupied by the Soviet Union and as a consequence of peasant guerrilla movements led by Stalinists in Yugoslavia, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Struggles for independence erupted in large parts of the colonial world. In January 1959, Fidel Castro and his petty-bourgeois peasant guerrilla movement, the July 26 Movement, overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. Faced with U.S. imperialism’s increasing hostility, the Castro government allied with the Soviet Union and, beginning in August 1960, nationalized broad sectors of the Cuban economy, drove out the Cuban bourgeoisie and created a deformed workers state. This small country, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, succeeded in defying the American colossus and carried through a social transformation that inspired a whole generation of radicalized youth around the world.

The Fourth International, which had been founded in 1938 under Leon Trotsky’s leadership, was deeply disoriented when capitalism was overthrown under the leadership of Stalinist forces. Michel Pablo, then leader of the Fourth International, reacted impressionistically to the onset of the 1947-48 Cold War and Stalinist expansion. He abandoned the struggle to build Trotskyist parties that aim to lead the proletariat in the international struggle for socialist revolution (see “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 21, Fall 1972). Pablo abandoned the program of political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracies in the USSR and East Europe, claiming that a process of “self-reform” would ultimately eliminate the bureaucratic deformations in these countries. Maintaining that “the international relationship of forces” was becoming unfavorable to imperialism, he declared that “the objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.” Pablo concluded that Stalinist and other reformist parties could adopt an approximately revolutionary perspective and that the task of the Trotskyists was to enter these parties and push them in a revolutionary direction. Pablo’s perspective of “deep entrism” led to the destruction of the Fourth International in 1951-53.

In 1960 in Belgium, Ernest Mandel, Pablo’s right-hand man, became the power behind the throne of prominent left-talking trade-union bureaucrat André Renard, who went on to sell out the 1960-61 general strike that shook Belgian capitalism just after the loss of its main colony in the Congo. Pablo himself became an adviser to the bourgeois-nationalist National Liberation Front government in Algeria after that country wrested its independence from France in 1962. In that role, Pablo participated in writing the laws on “self-management” that tied the Algerian workers movement to the bourgeois state apparatus so as to defuse the massive factory and farm occupations that had spread across newly independent Algeria.

The Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) and its youth group the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR), the predecessors of Olivier Besancenot and Alain Krivine’s New Anti-Capitalist Party, intervened into the events of May ’68 with the same Pabloite politics that destroyed the Fourth International. Instead of orienting to the working class as the driving force of socialist revolution, they focused on the student movement, billed as the “new vanguard,” and, to a lesser extent, tried to pressure the PCF/CGT bureaucracy. The destruction of the Fourth International meant that France had no revolutionary organization capable of intervening in the events of May ’68.

Our comrades in the United States had been expelled just five years earlier from the American Socialist Workers Party. The Socialist Workers Party had been Trotskyist, the historic party led by James P. Cannon, who did fight Pabloite revisionism, although belatedly and mainly on the American national terrain. Our comrades were seeking to break out of isolation and in May ’68 were engaged in discussions in particular with Voix Ouvrière in France.

The social explosion in France in May ’68 was not a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky. The Algerian War had a huge impact and radicalized a layer of students and workers. In many cases, they were breaking from the Communist Party, which had turned its back on Algerian independence until very late, that is, until French president Charles de Gaulle and the French bourgeoisie understood that they had lost the war and were forced to recognize Algeria’s independence.

Looking at the news headlines from April and May 1968, you can see that they also focused on the Vietnam War. Just after the victorious Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, negotiations began in Paris between American imperialism and the North Vietnamese. Let’s not forget that after defeating the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Vietnamese Communist Party and Ho Chi Minh agreed, apparently under joint pressure from Moscow and Beijing, to hand half of Vietnam back to the imperialists, in accordance with the Stalinist theory of peaceful coexistence—which the imperialists needless to say never abided by. For the American imperialists, Vietnam was one of the main fronts in the struggle against Communism, where conflict escalated in 1965, for example with massive napalm bombing. That set off a lot of unrest around the world, including in France.

Many demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese people were organized by the PCF, the pseudo-Trotskyists and the Maoists. Note that at the time, the Pabloites of the PCI and the JCR were giving political support to the Vietnamese Communist Party. The leadership of the PCF, for its part, diverted the internationalist support of French workers into tailing de Gaulle’s policies. When it called for “Peace in Vietnam,” the PCF was really echoing de Gaulle, who, at the time, was maneuvering to preserve the influence of French imperialism in the former colonial world. In his September 1966 speech in Phnom Penh, de Gaulle denounced “the American war machine” and came out for an agreement with “the goal of establishing and guaranteeing the neutrality of the peoples of Indochina as well as their right to self-determination, as they actually are, each of them having full responsibility for its affairs.” The Soviet bureaucracy at the time saw de Gaulle as an ally who favored peaceful coexistence, preferring him to the pro-NATO French social democrats. Meanwhile the Maoist bureaucracy in China considered de Gaulle an anti-imperialist!

In early 1968 there was also the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia. There were cracks in the Stalinist bureaucracy in that country. The “reform” wing led by Alexander Dubcek promised “socialism with a human face” to the population, which was trying to get rid of the bureaucratic straitjacket. This situation could have opened the road to a political revolution. And it is precisely because there was the possibility to open the road to proletarian political revolution that would drive out the parasitic bureaucracy and establish a healthy workers state that the Soviets intervened to crush the protests in Prague in August 1968, provoking a new split in the pro-Moscow Stalinist parties and affecting the working class internationally.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, partly under the influence of the Vietnam War and the domestic unrest in the United States, in particular the struggle for black liberation, a series of prerevolutionary and revolutionary situations arose in Europe—in France in May 1968, in Italy in 1969, in Portugal in 1974-75. These situations were the best opportunities for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries since the period immediately after World War II. They gave the lie to the anti-working-class theories, based on the writings of Herbert Marcuse in particular, that had been so popular before 1968. According to these theories, the working class had become “bourgeoisified” and could no longer play its historic role as the motor force for revolution.

In these countries the pro-Moscow Communist Parties and the social democrats would come to the rescue of the tottering bourgeois order. That’s how the Western reformist parties, including the Stalinist parties, would play an enormous counterrevolutionary role contributing to the later destruction of the Soviet Union. The restabilization of bourgeois order in the Western imperialist countries in the mid 1970s was quickly followed by the imperialists’ second Cold War offensive against the Soviet bloc.

While the ideological climate of the “death of communism” affects the consciousness of the proletariat today, in many countries fierce class struggles provide an objective basis for reinvigorating Marxism as the theory of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution. It is not communism but its parody, Stalinism, that has proven to be a dead end.

“Big Strike” or Prerevolutionary Situation?

In France, following the big miners strike of 1963, the numerous workers struggles of 1967 were a harbinger of the explosion of May-June ’68. The students were the spark. There was a real radicalization in this milieu over social questions as well as international questions such as the Vietnam War. Early in May the Gaullist regime, faced with growing unrest in the universities, especially in Paris, cracked down more and more on the students until the “night of the barricades” on May 10, when the police forces went wild, sending several hundred students to the hospital. In response, the major unions as well as the professors union and student organizations called for a one-day general strike on May 13, the tenth anniversary of the military coup d’état and de Gaulle’s seizure of power. By the hundreds of thousands, blue- and white-collar workers and youth marched in the streets of Paris with slogans like “Happy Anniversary, General” and “Ten Years Is Enough.” After this one-day general strike, the working class threw itself into battle.

Starting on May 14, the Sud-Aviation plant in Nantes Bouguenais went on strike, and the next day it was the Renault Cléon automobile plant, and then all of Renault. At that time Renault still played a key role in France, the saying being, “When Renault sneezes, France catches a cold.” The movement spread to heavy industry, and then to all the factories in the country and to public transportation (trains, subways, etc.). Other sectors were rapidly impacted: banks, insurance, the post office, teachers (elementary, secondary, university), big department stores, etc.

Sectors that rarely strike, such as thousands of factories that did not have unions (because the bosses banned them or because they were too small), found themselves occupied for the first time by workers—men and women. By May 21, that is, one week after the May 13 general strike, several million workers were on strike, the figure generally cited being ten million.

That meant that the country was completely paralyzed by a general strike. People always talk about the prominent factories that had a huge political influence, but the strike was massive and total because all the factories were shut down. You have to understand that France in 1968 was much more industrial than today. On the order of 37 percent of the employed population was working-class, mostly with industrial jobs. The policy of industrial decentralization in the late 1950s and early 1960s created an important industrial network. Industry was no longer concentrated in the Paris region, the North and Lyon. Factories with several hundred or even a thousand men and women workers were set up in very small cities, even villages, in the provinces.

We say that this was a prerevolutionary situation. But what is a revolutionary situation? Lenin said, in “The Collapse of the Second International” (1915):

“To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes,’ a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time,’ but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action.”

The first point is easily illustrated with a few examples:

¥ Edouard Balladur (who at the time was a young adviser to Prime Minister Pompidou) relates how, when the ministers phoned the préfets (regional government officials) to clear out the factories, the préfets answered that…they couldn’t.

¥ The CGT 76 union branch in Seine-Maritime put out a pamphlet on their area in May-June ’68 that is full of interesting details. So, for instance, they corroborate Balladur’s story by publishing the authorization that the assistant préfet of Dieppe gave the CGT, at the latter’s request, to control the distribution of gasoline.

¥ When de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp General de Boissieu tried to get hold of General Massu in Germany, the telephone operator explained to him that she would have to ask permission from the strike committee to put this international call through.

Nantes is generally mentioned as the only example of a city run by a strike committee. But some recently published research about cities outside of Paris in May-June ’68 brings to light how millions of workers managed their day-to-day affairs through strike committees. Many large urban areas (working-class ones, actually) had strike committees that managed food, childcare, gas distribution; also the CGT saw to providing electricity and water, garbage collection, etc.—all things that are taken care of by the government in normal times.

This shows how much the regime was teetering. “The upper classes” were apparently “unable” to live the old way. And the rapid growth of the strike, without any call by the union leadership, showed that the masses were also “unable” to put up with the old ways.

The reason the prerevolutionary situation in May-June ’68 ultimately did not turn into a revolutionary situation is that independent working-class action did not develop further, mainly because of the lack of a revolutionary party capable of tearing the working class away from its misleaders, including the PCF. There were strike committees in all the occupied plants. The CGT 76 pamphlet I mentioned earlier, for instance, reprinted instructions from the CGT local leadership in Dieppe asking each occupied plant “to form a strike committee of the leading comrades, if they had not already done so.” At best, these committees consisted of the local leaders of the various unions. They weren’t (or were rarely) elected by the workers and only rarely asked the workers for their opinions. They had a lot of power, but they were controlled by the union bureaucrats.

The Popular Front: The Greatest Crime

What was beginning to be posed by the strike was the question of power. The PCF was very conscious of this, right from the start. But for them, it was out of the question for the working class to drive out the bourgeoisie and take power. To divert the movement and protect itself, the PCF fought to form a government based on an alliance with the Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste (FGDS). The FGDS was a bloc between the social democrats of the SFIO (the French Socialist party) and several small capitalist parties. This is what we call a popular-front government and what the PCF at the time was calling a “people’s government.”

A popular-front government is a government that includes bourgeois workers parties like the PCF and the SFIO, and bourgeois parties. Bourgeois workers parties are parties that have a pro-capitalist leadership and program but are linked to the working class historically and through their base. In 1968, the bourgeois Radical-Socialist Party and future French president François Mitterrand’s Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR) were in the FGDS together with the SFIO. In other words, the FGDS itself was already a popular-frontist formation. Through a popular front, bourgeois workers parties can mask their contradictions and hide behind their bourgeois allies to betray the workers’ expectations. An example was when the PCF called for breaking the 1936 general strike. (PCF leader Thorez famously said, “One must know how to end a strike.”) It did this under the pretext of not wanting to frighten its allies in the Radical Party.

In France, popular fronts, which have included the PCF since 1935, have, in one form or another for more than a century, been a key tool for the bourgeoisie to try to co-opt struggle. As soon as struggle erupts, the reformists seek to channel discontent into a new “left” governmental alliance with bourgeois forces that will inevitably stab workers, the poor and minorities in the back. But the popular front isn’t the only means of containing working-class struggle—to preserve its class rule, the “democratic” bourgeoisie will not hesitate to resort to more right-wing versions of parliamentary democracy or to bonapartism or even to fascism.

That’s what had happened in France in the middle of the Algerian War, with de Gaulle’s 1958 coup d’état, which established a bonapartist regime. In May ’68, too, de Gaulle would contemplate using the army to break the general strike, as we will see later. Trotsky wrote:

“By Bonapartism we mean a regime in which the economically dominant class, having the qualities necessary for democratic methods of government, finds itself compelled to tolerate—in order to preserve its possessions—the uncontrolled command of a military and police apparatus over it, of a crowned ‘savior.’ This kind of situation is created in periods when the class contradictions have become particularly acute; the aim of Bonapartism is to prevent explosions.”

—“Again on the Question of Bonapartism,” March 1935

Preventing explosions is also the purpose of the popular front. Since the end of the Algerian War, well before the events of 1968 unfolded, the PCF and CGT leadership had been trying to build this kind of bourgeois coalition with the SFIO and the various anti-Gaullist bourgeois parties. Although it was hegemonic on the “left,” the PCF went as far as not fielding a candidate in the 1965 presidential elections in order to give direct support to Mitterrand, who at that time was a member of the CIR, a bourgeois organization.

In the 1967 parliamentary elections, the PCF, the SFIO, the Radicals and the CIR ran separately and got better results than in 1965. Some Stalinists came to the conclusion that the left had missed winning a parliamentary majority by only a nose, after they took into account the other, bourgeois anti-Gaullist members of parliament! You have to understand that the PCF had just three fewer members of parliament than the SFIO. The PCF had 73 members of parliament, while all the other “left” parties together had 121. This shows how impossible it was to ignore the PCF in those days.

As soon as it felt the pressure mounting when the May-June ’68 events began, the PCF pressed its potential partners to build a popular-front alliance. On May 10, before the “night of the barricades,” the PCF leadership met with the FGDS to propose an alliance based on a common program for managing capitalism, their “people’s government.” This had no result; no agreement was concluded. On May 19, when the strike had already spread, the CGT and PCF put out a declaration explaining that “the power of the popular movement urgently calls for an agreement among left organizations on a common program of government with an advanced social content, guaranteeing the rights of unions and satisfying the workers’ main demands.” Further meetings took place between the PCF and its potential partners on May 20, 22, 28 and even May 30, always with the same goal. Building a “people’s government” became a watchword of the PCF’s propaganda right down to the factory-floor level, for everybody from CGT secretary-general Georges Séguy speaking before 25,000 Renault Billancourt workers on May 20 to ordinary activists in the plants.

This question of class collaboration and of the popular front would have been key for a revolutionary party to take on in May-June ’68. In Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party categorically opposed the capitalist Provisional Government, which included Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs) along with ten capitalist ministers. The Bolsheviks won the leadership of the working class by showing the workers, who were influenced by the Mensheviks and the SRs whom they had elected to lead the soviets (workers councils), that there was a contradiction between their leaders’ pretensions to socialism and their alliance with the capitalists. In May 1968 the opposite happened. The Stalinists’ constant search for an alliance with bourgeois parties (the FGDS above all) was the best proof that the PCF did not want to give a revolutionary purpose to the strike, that it did not want the strike committees to have the role of getting society going again in the interests of the working class, which would have led to a confrontation with the bourgeoisie.

In the end, the PCF sold out the May-June ’68 strike for a few crumbs. Throughout everything, its goal was for this strike of millions of workers to end with de Gaulle’s resignation and replacement by a bourgeois popular-front government. Given their influence in the working class, these leaders could not imagine that the PCF and CGT would not get corresponding government positions. In other words, they did not want a token ministerial portfolio in a pro-NATO social-democratic government, but a significant presence in one. In the end, it was the virulent pro-NATO anti-Communism of the SFIO and some of the bourgeois parties that prevented such an agreement.

When they form a popular front, by choosing bourgeois partners, the reformists clearly signal their intention to govern with the capitalists against the workers. At that point there is no contradiction to exploit between their actual pro-capitalist practice and a non-existent socialist platform. Trotskyists’ opposition to such coalitions is implacable. It is our duty to warn the working class against the danger they represent.
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Workers Vanguard No. 974
18 February 2011



France, May 1968

Prerevolutionary Situation Betrayed by Communist Party

Part Two

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below the second part of a forum given by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, translated and adapted for publication from the LTF’s newspaper Le Bolchévik (Nos. 185 and 186, September and December 2008). Part One, which appeared in WV No. 972 (21 January), focused on the period ending in mid May, when the general strike that had been sparked by the brutal repression of student protests spread throughout the country.

By the end of May 1968, France was so paralyzed by the general strike that the bourgeoisie quickly decided to open negotiations, which took place at the employment ministry on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris. In 2008, the French Communist Party (PCF) issued a special edition of their newspaper L’Humanité about May ’68. It included an interview with Georges Séguy, a PCF leader and secretary-general of the CGT trade-union federation in 1968, who said, “In the first ten minutes of the Grenelle meeting, we were able to raise the SMIC [minimum wage] by 35 percent, and the minimum wage for farm workers by 55 percent.” Thus Séguy confirmed what Trotsky said in “Once Again, Whither France?” (March 1935): “The general Marxist thesis ‘Social reforms are only the by-products of the revolutionary struggle’ has, in the epoch of the decline of capitalism, the most immediate and burning importance. The capitalists are able to cede something to the workers only if they are threatened with the danger of losing everything.” In spite of the concessions that Séguy greatly exaggerated as “enormous,” the CGT did not sign off on the negotiations but called to continue the strike. For several reasons.

The PCF, which led the CGT union federation, was perfectly aware that the working class was not ready to go back to work so easily, for so little, because the PCF and the CGT were present in most of the occupied factories. This detail shows how well the Stalinists knew their business: on day one of the occupation at the Renault plant in Billancourt, the most important factory in the country, the PCF sent a member of the Political Bureau, Claude Poperen, to stay in the plant to get a sense of the pulse of the working class. The PCF and the CGT had lots of experience betraying the workers—Benoît Frachon, a negotiator at Grenelle, had been a negotiator before, at the Matignon negotiations during the 1936 general strike. The PCF knew “how to end a strike,” like in 1936 when they diverted the workers struggles into support for Léon Blum’s popular-front government, which was an alliance between bourgeois and reformist socialist parties to manage capitalism. In 1968, without the prospect of a new popular-front government that would try to contain the workers’ militancy and their hopes for change, it would have been very damaging for the PCF to call them back to work in exchange for such minimal concessions.

Another reason for the PCF to refuse to sign off on the agreement was that the rest of the left was increasingly maneuvering for a popular front without them. The PCF sought to use the Grenelle negotiations to pressure its putative partners to understand that, without the PCF, it would be impossible to find a “solution” to the strike that would serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.

French president Charles de Gaulle appeared on TV on May 24, calling for a referendum on unspecified reforms and threatening to resign if it failed. He intended this to be a referendum on his continued rule. His announcement flopped. Everybody knew the referendum would be boycotted or would fail. The question of power began to be posed more and more clearly. The Paris préfet (a regional official from the national government) at the time, Grimaud, tells in his book how some in de Gaulle’s entourage raised the question of replacing de Gaulle. The bourgeoisie and the politicians saw that the government was tottering and looked for parliamentary and institutional answers, and accelerated their maneuvers.

During the Grenelle negotiations, which went on from May 25 to the morning of the 27th, the non-Communist left, with the enthusiastic support of pseudo-revolutionaries (the Pabloite Parti Communiste Internationaliste and Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, Voix Ouvrière [VO], and Pierre Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste), organized a rally in Charléty Stadium in Paris to which the PCF was not invited. Held on May 27, this gathering brought out tens of thousands of people. Pierre Mendès-France did not speak, but his presence was notable and noted, with part of the crowd chanting his name when he appeared. (Mendès-France was a bourgeois politician from the Radical Party who had won the leadership of the Parti Socialiste Unifié, a left social-democratic party. He was popular in 1968 because he was known for opposing the Algerian War.) On the morning of May 28, the left bourgeois politician François Mitterrand, who would later become leader of the Socialist Party, held a press conference in which he put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency—which he considered “vacant”—while holding open the door to Mendès-France for prime minister.

The Charléty maneuver enraged the PCF and CGT because they understood perfectly well what was up: the anti-Communist, pro-U.S. social democrats wanted to have their own popular-frontist solution without the PCF. The PCF had no intention of being taken for a ride. To make very clear that no one was getting around them, the PCF and CGT called for workers demonstrations on May 29. Politically, the PCF and CGT bureaucrats had a hold over their ranks, who accepted their perspective of a “people’s government” (although they probably had a different interpretation of what it meant, especially since the CGT had committed to taking part in it). The front page of L’Humanité on the 29th, addressing the demonstrations, headlined “The Workers’ Demand: A People’s Government of Democratic Union with Communist Participation!” Which is very clear, to say the least.

The May 29 demonstrations were some of the largest during May-June ’68. They had a dual purpose: to try to shake Gaullist power a little more, so de Gaulle would resign, and to convince the left that its response could only be parliamentary, but not without the PCF. As Séguy said in 1972: “With the regime seeming shaky to us, we really and very sincerely wanted to revive unity. But once again our proposal encountered nothing but widespread evasion on the part of those to whom it was addressed.” In fact, the PCF attempted to work out a popular-front alliance in a meeting with the Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste on the afternoon of May 28, after Mitterrand’s press conference. This came to nothing. During this meeting, Waldeck Rochet, the secretary-general of the PCF, asked, “Will there be any Communist ministers?”, to which Mitterrand replied, “At least one.” One can imagine how that sat with Waldeck Rochet.

What Should Revolutionaries Have Done?

In May 1968 we had no organization in France. But our American comrades wrote an article on the French May events in Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 12, September-October 1968, that has stood the test of time remarkably. We printed it in French in our 1988 pamphlet on May ’68. In this pamphlet, retrospectively, we advocated a slogan for the month of May calling for a government of the PCF and the unions based on the strike committees. You have to remember, in that period the workers were demonstrating behind the PCF’s slogan for a “people’s government,” which they understood in a largely parliamentary framework. Calling for a PCF-union government would have been a means of transcending this parliamentary framework: how could the CGT union federation, how could the strike committees participate in a parliamentary government? This would have been a powerful perspective to put against the PCF’s popular-front plans, in order to turn the PCF’s base against its leadership by explaining that the PCF leaders were maneuvering for an alliance with the bourgeoisie instead of turning the strike committees into organs of workers power. The French Trotskyists put forward a similar slogan in 1946, for a government of the PCF, CGT and SFIO (the French Socialist party), in a terribly unstable situation when the PCF was participating in a popular-front government.

The question of turning the strike committees led by the bureaucrats into true embryos of workers power would have been key for a revolutionary party in May-June 1968. This would have made the question of the state central—that the state is not neutral but serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist state is the cops, the army, the prison guards and the judges. Its job is to protect the tiny minority that owns the means of production against the vast majority—the proletarians, who have nothing to sell but their labor power, and all the oppressed. The main task of the government that administers the state, whether on the national or the municipal level, is to bring that power to bear in order to maintain the capitalist order.

So Séguy, while implicitly recognizing that the CGT and the PCF were in control and were deciding what would and would not happen in the country’s economy, bent over backwards to get the workers to rely on the bourgeois state. The PCF directed the strike support committees I mentioned earlier, which organized food and other supplies, to the mayors’ offices and put them under the mayors’ authority, that is, under the authority of the capitalist state. (These were often PCF mayors, but not always.) The mayors are the representatives of the bourgeois state closest to the population, under the authority of the préfet. Hence our position of refusing to run for executive offices like mayor or president: we want the working class to learn that its ultimate goal must be to destroy the bourgeois state, not run it. (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009.) Fostering the worst illusions among the working class, the PCF explicitly told workers not to organize and run society themselves.

Now, 40 years later, VO’s successor Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Pabloites both spout the same reformist illusions that the PCF did in 1968, i.e., that the bourgeois state can serve the interests of the working class. While the PCF thinks this can be done by having lots of members in parliament, LO and the Pabloites want to use pressure from the masses to make the bourgeois state serve the workers. This sweeps into the trash one of the main lessons Marx and Engels drew from the revolutions of 1848 and especially the Paris Commune: the working class cannot confine itself to laying hold of the machinery of the bourgeois state, but must smash it.

Strike Committees

Trotskyists would have fought for elected strike committees instead of committees appointed by the bureaucrats. We would have called for the strike committees to oversee the distribution of food and other supplies themselves, as well as resuming those services and utilities that the Stalinists wanted to turn over to the bourgeois state. By linking this to the Stalinists’ attempt to come to an agreement with bourgeois parties and politicians, Trotskyists could have exploited the contradictions that existed in the PCF and CGT, setting the base against the top, showing workers who wanted to fight for socialism that their leadership’s intent was not to achieve socialism, but to manage capitalism. So there would be a political struggle between a revolutionary perspective—that the working class has the power to run society for its own needs and to do that it must destroy the bourgeois state—and the opposing view of the reformists, who, at bottom, respect the capitalist order, private property and the bourgeois state.

Strike committees, workers councils and soviets are not revolutionary in themselves. Only a revolutionary leadership gives a revolutionary character to these organs of working-class power. Under the PCF’s leadership, these committees looked to the bourgeois state, to the mayors’ offices. Revolutionaries would have fought for them to have their own centralized organization, relying on the working class itself rather than organs of bourgeois power like the municipal governments. We would have sought to prepare workers politically, by every means available, to understand the need to act independently of all bourgeois forces, to organize workers militias to defend their positions, and to prepare to seize power and destroy the capitalist state.

It is easier to understand this point if you look at the situation in Russia in late July 1917, when the leaders of the soviets (the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries) were throwing Bolsheviks in jail. Lenin, who had fled to Finland to avoid arrest, thought that the workers should build new organs to move toward seizing power because he could see that, under the leadership of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, the soviets had tended to become a mere extension of bourgeois power. As it happened, the Bolsheviks subsequently won leadership of the soviets.

Revolutionaries’ struggle needs to be based on a transitional program, leading the workers to the understanding that, in order to run society in their own interests, they have to be prepared to overthrow the bourgeois state. Trotsky explained in the Transitional Program (1938):

“It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

Vital Questions: Immigrants, Women, Youth

Revolutionaries putting forward a transitional program in 1968 would have faced some other key questions: immigrants, women and youth. There were almost three million immigrants in France in 1968, mostly Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Algerians. Back then, there were a lot of young male workers, either single or with family still in the old country—practically none were second generation. They lived in terrible conditions, in flophouses or shantytowns (200 still existed at the time), working mainly in construction and in industries that employ metals. A total of 85 percent of immigrant workers had no job skills, and many professions were forbidden to them by law. There were about 500,000 immigrant workers in construction, 370,000 in industries employing metals and in steel, 260,000 in agriculture. Women were often cleaning ladies. The proportion of immigrants varied widely in different sectors of production.

Immigrants were generally not allowed to engage in political activity. They couldn’t get elected as union reps without six to 24 months of seniority. Immigrant workers very often had work contracts lasting no longer than six months, which prevented them from ever being integrated in the unions. The Portuguese had spent 35 years under Salazar’s dictatorship. If they engaged in political activity in France, they were deported and wound up in the prisons of Portugal or in Portuguese colonies in Africa. Dozens of Portuguese workers who played an active role in the May ’68 strike disappeared afterward. Algerian workers were just coming off a victorious war of national liberation. They reportedly took a very active part in the strike from day one. Now they were fighting alongside French workers against the same capitalist class that had slaughtered their brothers during the Algerian War. To cement class unity, there should have been calls for full citizenship rights for all who were in France, with a fight for the same political and social rights that French workers had and to do away with all discrimination on the job, in housing and in education.

The bourgeoisie had been pitting various communities against each other for a very long time. But as May ’68 unfolded, the divisions between the different ethnic sectors of the proletariat largely broke down. In construction in particular, immigrants were in the vanguard: French workers represented a labor aristocracy who didn’t want to strike, whereas three-quarters of the unskilled workers were immigrants. Although the presence of the CGT or the PCF was often seen in this period as a protection against the worst manifestations of racism, with the PCF there actually was some chauvinism in May-June 1968. When strike support money was distributed, the Algerians had to fight to have their families back in Algeria taken into account.

After May ’68, deportations of immigrants took place (officially 215 through December 1968), especially of Spaniards (Spain was under Franco), and of Algerians known as opponents of Algerian ruler Houari Boumedienne. There were important protests against this, mainly taken up by liberal intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Alain Krivine’s Pabloites, although the immigrant question was not a significant part of their intervention into the events of May ’68.

Ten years ago, when the left was running articles on the 30th anniversary of May ’68, we wrote, “For all the ‘Trotskyist’ groups that have wasted paper spreading inanities about May ’68 recently, not one even mentions the question of immigrant workers. But this question was already strategic, even at that time” (Le Bolchévik No. 147, Autumn 1998). And that’s still true. On the 40th anniversary they still have nothing to say about immigrant workers. The conclusion we drew on that score in the 1998 article is also still valid: “The fact that the far left raised the immigrant question scarcely or not at all in May ’68 represents a capitulation to social-chauvinism and its own bourgeoisie. In a country just emerging from a dirty colonial war [in Algeria] in which the reformist leaderships of the working class, under the cover of ‘Republican values,’ defended their own imperialism, this question was key to the proletarian unity needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie.”

The working class as a whole must defend the rights of immigrants and minorities, otherwise it leaves itself open to being weakened, divided and set back under the bourgeoisie’s attacks. The struggle against this division must be linked to the understanding that the overturn of capitalist society is the only means of doing away with racism once and for all.

The woman question was also central. Women represented a significant portion of the working class in 1968. There were about 1,800,000 women workers, constituting almost 22 percent of the working class. The vast majority of them were unskilled. In other words, they were at the bottom of the ladder, performing, like immigrant workers, many of the most arduous, unskilled and lowest-paid jobs. And they had very few rights. Abortion was totally illegal under a 1920 law. (Even today this right is limited by bourgeois morality, by all the difficulties immigrant women face and because of the “conscience clause” that doctors can invoke to refuse to perform abortions.) The ban on contraception had been lifted in 1967, but access to it remained very limited. The law forbidding a woman to even open a bank account without her husband’s permission wasn’t changed until 1965. The terms of divorce were very unfavorable for women and had not changed much since the Napoleonic Code. Questions of sexuality were completely taboo. Coeducation did not exist. In May ’68, women workers overwhelmingly struck and occupied their factories.

A revolutionary party would have sought to address problems specific to women. It would also have fought in the working class as a whole against the bourgeois prejudices peddled by the workers’ misleaders. In his recent book, L’Insubordination Ouvrière dans les Années 68 [Worker Insubordination in the ’68 Years], Xavier Vigna gives the example of the needle trades in Lorient, a port in Brittany, where the women of one factory got several neighboring factories to come out on strike and led a march to the CGT union local to take part in union activities. However, when it came to engaging in talks and negotiations, these were handled by a man who worked at the military shipyard. Vigna gives two examples of occupations (at the SNECMA aircraft plant in Gennevilliers and a clothing factory in Lille) where it was decided that the women would occupy the plant during the day and the men would do it at night. This was probably the case in most plants, reflecting the bourgeois family norm that women should be at home in the evening. In an interview in L’Humanité’s supplement on May ’68, Gisèle Halimi, who became a founder of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF, Women’s Liberation Movement), tells how, full of hope for the cause of women, she ended up setting up chairs and cooking meals at the Censier campus.

In a prerevolutionary situation like 1968, the intervention of a revolutionary party would have had a resounding echo among women, including petty-bourgeois women. Calls for the right to abortion and contraception and “equal pay for equal work” would certainly have done a lot to win women over to the perspective for a socialist society and the need for workers revolution. At the same time, raising such demands in the many demonstrations and on the picket lines could have raised the consciousness of the working class as a whole by breaking out of the confines of strictly economic demands.

A revolutionary party would have explained how women’s oppression stems from private ownership of the means of production. Marx and Engels identified the family as the principal source of women’s oppression because of its role in the inheritance of property, in particular of the means of production. Sexual monogamy on the part of women—as well as their social subordination—is required in order to determine without doubt the paternity of the heir. We say that the social institution of the family must be replaced (that differentiates us from bourgeois feminists). This can be accomplished only after a socialist revolution, as a planned economy will free men and women from domestic chores with 24/7 day care, quality collective laundries and dining, etc.

Just as with the immigrant question, it’s appalling to see how absent this question is from the propaganda put out by the left in 1968, although women’s oppression at the time was egregious and women had a massive presence in the strikes. This left the road open for bourgeois feminists, who went on to found the MLF in 1970. A lot of the women who ended up in the MLF after 1968 could probably have been won to the only program that can really lead to women’s liberation: socialist revolution. Once the MLF was created, pseudo-revolutionaries like the Pabloites would “discover” the woman question and start tailing the bourgeois feminist movement.

Students were the spark that lit the fire. Among workers, it was often the younger ones, both men and women, who spearheaded strikes and occupations. The family is the basis not only for women’s oppression, but also for the oppression of youth. And the Gaullist regime was very hardline and moralistic about “family values.” Questions of sex were taboo in Gaullist society, as I said before—there was no coeducation and homosexuals had no rights. Minors who wanted birth control still had to get their parents’ permission. Young people were subject to parental authority and had very few rights. There was mandatory 16-month military service. Any propaganda against the bourgeois army and the draft would have had a lot of impact, especially when de Gaulle was contemplating turning to the army to crush the working class.

A revolutionary party would have sought to win student youth to join the cause of the proletariat, the only force capable of ending all forms of oppression. By building a revolutionary youth organization independent of the party but sharing the same program, it would have been possible to recruit youth, the flame of the proletarian revolution.

To wrap up my remarks about intervening on these pivotal questions I’ll quote the Transitional Program, which explains:

“Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness and readiness to sacrifice.”
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Markin comment on Part Three of this series:

Pay particular attention to the section in this Part Three when the speaker does an analysis of the evolving positions over time of the various participants, individuals and organizations (VO, PCF Pabloites, etc.), and their changing view of what was possible in 1968 (reflecting their more mature and “wiser” understanding now, I am sure), This is something of an art form, especially for those who “blew it” when they had a chance. Starting, probably with Bela Kun and the fiasco of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919, every unsuccessful or stillborn revolution has had its apologists about how the thing could not have possibly have been successful, objectively of course. The great architect of this after the fact justification though was August Thalheimer (and his latter day apologist Mike Jones from the pages of the journal, Revolutionary History), one of the leaders of the German Communist Party in 1923 when there was an exceptional opportunity for the revolution to succeed and change the course of 20th century history.

Sure revolutionary activity is hard, and there is not guarantee of success beforehand, but out of the events of 1968 in France one could have projected a very strong mass party filled to the brim with disgruntled Stalinist workers looking for a new way and a hard layer of students now wedded to the idea of the centrality of the working class in a socialist revolution. In America out of the 1960s we could have projected a stronger anti-imperialist organization out of the opposition to the Vietnam War. In both case those prospects were not fanciful, and were doable. If the revolutionary politics had been there rather than the fight, the hard fight, by the reformists (and centrists) to give everything back to bourgeois society. As we are, painfully, aware of now such revolutionary opportunities do not come that often so you had better give us your A game, your Bolshevik A game. The rest we do not need.
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Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011

France, May 1968

Prerevolutionary Situation Betrayed by Communist Party

Part Three

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below the final part of a forum by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, translated and adapted from the LTF’s newspaper Le Bolchévik (Nos. 185 and 186, September and December 2008). Parts One and Two, which appeared in WV Nos. 972 and 974 (21 January and 18 February), covered the period from May 13, when a nationwide general strike followed the brutal repression of student demonstrations, to the end of May.

As we saw, leading up to May 29, the regime in France was badly shaken. A portion of the bourgeoisie was wondering about President Charles de Gaulle. On the 29th, the day of the big demonstrations called by the French Communist Party (PCF), de Gaulle “disappeared” off to Baden-Baden to consult General Jacques Massu, the chief of staff of the French army in Germany. Massu convinced de Gaulle to stand firm, no doubt assuring him that the army was prepared to intervene if necessary—which would have meant civil war. Even though that plan was never carried out, it was definitely an option de Gaulle was contemplating in case he could not put an end to the strike by parliamentary means. This simple fact confirms the Marxist theory of the state, which exists to defend the capitalist order through force.

In his book Baden ’68, Massu also reported that on May 28, the day before his meeting with de Gaulle, he had received with pomp and circumstance the commander-in-chief of Soviet troops in East Germany, Marshal Koshevoy, who recommended that he “crush” the students in Paris and had nothing but praise for de Gaulle. In other words, the bureaucracy of the Soviet degenerated workers state was prepared to see revolution in France strangled in order to preserve de Gaulle, because of his semi-autonomy from the U.S.-led anti-Soviet NATO alliance.

On the morning after the big May 29 demonstrations, the CGT trade-union federation had another meeting with the Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste (FGDS, a bloc comprising the French Socialist party and small bourgeois parties) and the PCF (which led the CGT). The purpose of the meeting was to convince the FGDS to form an electoral alliance with the PCF/CGT.

That evening, de Gaulle went on the offensive, emboldened by the support of the military and, no doubt, by the report Massu had given him about his encounter with Koshevoy. De Gaulle dissolved the French parliament, launched a virulent anti-Communist attack on the PCF and CGT, practically accusing them of plotting a coup d’état, and called for a mobilization of the “people”—in other words, the bourgeoisie, the part of the petty bourgeoisie that had not been won over by the strikers and the dregs of society well known to the likes of Charles Pasqua. (Pasqua was key for the covert operations de Gaulle ran using thugs and gangsters.) De Gaulle promised to free a dozen leaders of the OAS who were still in jail. (The OAS [Secret Army Organization] was a fascist organization led by former army officers that formed to oppose French withdrawal from Algeria.) He did this by mid June in order to make up with the far right and the officer corps.

Faced with this offensive the PCF and CGT were cornered, since they rejected any confrontation with the Gaullist regime outside of the institutional framework of parliament and the Fifth Republic. They wanted to avoid a fierce and uncontrollable clash at any price, so they had no option but to call the workers back to work. To make this happen, they would not hesitate to use any means, specifically atomizing the strike, which they started to do after the May 25-27 Grenelle negotiations between the government and capitalists and the unions. Since the PCF had no success coaxing the FGDS into an alliance, they knew they had no chance in the elections.

In spite of the absence of a revolutionary party able to expose the Stalinists’ rescue operation for capitalism and split the PCF by winning over militants disgusted by their leadership, the bureaucrats encountered fierce resistance from the working class. PCF leader Georges Séguy explained it this way: “In some cases, of which there were few, our activists had to argue strongly with workers who were in favor of continuing the strike in spite of the indisputable success we had had with the demands that we won. They had hoped for more decisive changes. They didn’t realize that the political situation didn’t allow us to go further.”

In Whither France? Trotsky said: “The most striking features of our epoch of capitalism in decay are intermediate and transitional: situations between the nonrevolutionary and the prerevolutionary, between the prerevolutionary and the revolutionary or…the counterrevolutionary. It is precisely these transitional stages that have a decisive importance from the point of view of political strategy” (ellipsis in original). It is easy to imagine that, if a revolutionary party had intervened as the strike grew, Trotsky’s words would have become concrete after May 30, when de Gaulle decided it was time for a showdown. That was a turning point in 1968 for both the bourgeoisie and the PCF.

It wasn’t until June 7 that the first significant back-to-work moves took place. It took several days to get those sectors that had kicked off the strike to go back. To finally overcome the determination to continue the strike, the bureaucrats used every contrivance: separate negotiations for individual union locals; false rumors of plants going back to work; back-to-work votes and, when those didn’t obtain the expected results, revotes, and so on, until they got the strikers back to work.

While the Stalinists maneuvered, the bourgeoisie sent the cops to attack key centers of workers’ resistance like the postal sorting centers and railroad terminals. On the night of June 5 the CRS riot cops took over the Renault factory in Flins. Four days of pitched battles ensued around the plant, during which the young Maoist high school student Gilles Tautin was killed. On June 11 the cops attacked the Peugeot factory in Sochaux; two workers were killed. On June 12 all the far left organizations (pseudo-Trotskyists, the “March 22 Movement” student organization, Maoist groups, etc.) were banned. Far from protesting this ban, when members of these organizations came to the factory gates, the PCF physically attacked them!

In the end, the bureaucrats and the state got what they wanted. The working class and its last holdouts, betrayed by their own leaders and lacking a credible revolutionary alternative, could no longer resist the pressure to go back to work and surrendered, sick at heart. The large percentage of workers who voted against going back shows how much reluctance there was. Some sectors like the workers in the metal industries went back very late. The CGT called to end the strike at the Renault plant in Billancourt on June 17. Krasucki (a CGT leader) got booed when he called for going back to work at Citroën on June 24. That was even after the first round of parliamentary elections, which took place on June 23 and were a landslide for the reactionaries!

Mentors of Today’s New Anti-Capitalist Party

Now let’s get back to what the Pabloite predecessors of New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) spokesman Olivier Besancenot were doing in May ’68. Political adaptation and capitulation are the Pabloites’ hallmark. And they didn’t miss any opportunities for that in this prerevolutionary period. They presented the radicalized students as the vanguard. For instance on May 20, the Pabloites’ international organization, the United Secretariat, declared: “There is still a huge gap between the revolutionary maturity of the vanguard of the youth and the workers’ level of consciousness.” But around 1968, all the organizations in the workers movement claimed to be fighting for socialism or communism. The working class was extremely combative and tended to identify its struggles with the 1917 Russian October Revolution.

In 1968, the Pabloites were centrists, that is, revolutionary in words and opportunist in deeds. Their rhetoric was full of references to workers revolution, to dual power, even “smashing the bourgeois state apparatus.” Thus, in a book he wrote in 1968 with his then-partner Henri Weber, now a Socialist Party senator, Pabloite leader Daniel Bensaïd could say: “The broken-down regime could no longer, in these troubled times, count on its own hirelings, the forces of repression were at the end of their rope, otherwise it was a debacle. Power was there for the taking. Anything was possible. The regime survived because of the lack of any candidate to take over.”

Instead of workers revolution, the Pabloites were for using pressure from the streets to form a popular-front government, that is, a government based on the alliance of bourgeois and workers parties to manage capitalism. Pierre Frank, leader of the Pabloite Parti Communiste Internationaliste, declared on May 22 (Intercontinental Press, 10 June 1968): “In these days when an unproclaimed general strike is in effect, it would be possible to force de Gaulle’s departure and to impose a CP-FGDS government by nonparliamentary but peaceful means.” The Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, the Pabloites’ youth organization, tried to make this sound more appetizing with their slogan “People’s government, yes! Mitterrand, Mendès-France, no!” (Mitterrand and Mendès-France were left bourgeois politicians.) Twenty years later, in 1988, Pabloite leaders Alain Krivine and Bensaïd admitted that “the formulation of ‘people’s government’ had, however, the advantage of referring to a government of the left parties without going into any more precise considerations” (Mai Si! 1968-1988: Rebelles et Repentis [Yes We May! 1968-1988: Rebels and Repenters]). According to the Pabloites, this government—which could only have been a bourgeois government—would have been under the “control” of the working class.

Let’s compare what the young Bensaïd wrote in 1968 with the hardened reformist he had become 20 years later, when he co-authored that 1988 book with Krivine. In the book, he polemicized against his earlier position, going further in Pabloite adaptation to popular-frontist and anti-Soviet pressure: “Anything was not possible in 1968: you cannot jump ahead of your own time and the existing relationship of forces. But something different was certainly possible.” And, again, further on: “Today we still remain convinced that there were other possibilities, other outcomes, other roads. Not the big day, Revolution with a capital ‘R,’ but the overturn of the regime through the strike and through extraparliamentary mobilization.” Bensaïd preferred to sweep the formulation “Anything was possible,” which he has come to consider too far left, under the rug. So he made his view clear, that the general strike could have forced de Gaulle to resign, after which he expected a popular front to replace him.

“Anything is possible” was a formulation used by the centrist Marceau Pivert during the 1936 revolutionary situation in France. At that time, Trotsky polemicized very sharply against Pivert, who talked about revolution while staying inside the SFIO (the French Socialist party), in which he represented the left wing. Pivert was to end up in the propaganda office of Léon Blum’s popular-front government. Trotsky sought to win youth and workers away from Pivert’s influence by exposing his politics, which provided a left cover for maintaining the capitalist order. There was someone who argued “Anything is not possible” against Pivert in 1936. It was PCF leader Maurice Thorez, the gravedigger of the revolutionary situation. Bensaïd and Krivine know this perfectly well. So it’s quite cynical for these two to adopt Thorez’s formulation in order to denounce the positions they themselves held in 1968. In hindsight, it is clear that they have moved from centrist political positions like Pivert’s to reformist ones like Thorez’s.

Today the Pabloites have thrown their forces into building the NPA. We call it the “New Anti-Communist Party” because it clearly represents their acceptance of and integration into the “death of communism” campaign. In all his public talks, Besancenot never forgets to explain that the 1990s saw the end of a cycle, that the cycle of the 1917 Revolution is over and that, for him, references to communism, Leninism and Trotskyism are a thing of the past. Whereupon he offers up “21st-century socialism” with pathetic, classic social-democratic proposals: take from the rich to give to the poor, working-class control of capitalism, etc., which he sums up as “revolutionizing society.” And above all, he’s ready and willing to participate in a bourgeois government if it is “anti-capitalist.”

Voix Ouvrière’s Economism in May ’68

In contrast to the Pabloites’ student vanguardism, Voix Ouvrière (VO) had a solid proletarian orientation, but it was mainly economist. The pamphlet that VO’s successor organization Lutte Ouvrière (LO) put out for the 40th anniversary of 1968 indicates:

“It was obvious that ‘the ten million striking workers weren’t demanding state power.’ For the most part, they didn’t have even the slightest idea what that meant, and Séguy, Waldeck Rochet and Marchais were certainly not going to enlighten them. May 1968 was obviously not like the situation in October 1917 [in Russia], with workers councils won to the idea of taking power, nor was it even February 1917, with soviets forming a de facto parallel power to that of the Provisional Government. In France in 1968, there was no embryo of dual power challenging the rule of the bourgeoisie in the name of the working class, even if only de facto, not even at the shopfloor level where strike committees composed of representatives of the workers in struggle existed only in a tiny number of factories.”

That’s true, but LO mentions it in order to argue that it was impossible for such workers councils to emerge. To do so, LO needs to distort reality. What they falsify is the extent to which the country, the Gaullist regime and the state were paralyzed. They disappear the possibility, opened up by the workers mobilizations, for a revolutionary leadership to transform the strike committees into true organs of proletarian power.

But while LO chides PCF leaders Séguy and Waldeck Rochet for failing to enlighten the workers about what workers power would mean, the workers clearly were not any more enlightened by VO’s newspaper and leaflets (judging by what LO has reprinted). Actually, LO concludes the passage I quoted earlier with an explanation of the program VO put forward during the entire May-June 1968 period:

“Simply on the level of economic demands, these would have called not only for wage increases greater than the measly proposals of the ‘Grenelle Agreement’ [and] an immediate return to a 40-hour workweek, but also a sliding scale of wages, which is the only way to prevent the bosses from recouping, in a few months of inflation, everything they had to give up. Not by leaving it to the government to assess the rate of inflation and the adjustment to be made to wage rates, but by calling on workers themselves to organize to control this.”

That is, indeed, VO/LO’s whole program and the sum total of the demands you can find in all of their leaflets and articles from May-June 1968. The only thing they add today is, of course, “workers control over the factories’ accounting in order to know exactly what their financial situations are.” Clearly, VO’s program in 1968 was the same as the CGT’s. It’s just that the amount they demanded for the minimum wage, etc., was greater.

For us, what will change workers’ consciousness and tear them out of the clutches of the reformists and centrists is the intervention of a revolutionary party with its program. This party will be built by forging cadres, organizing the most conscious elements of the working class, the vanguard. VO’s pamphlet shows they didn’t explain the need to do away with capitalism until the beginning of June, when the strike had already passed its peak.

Lenin laid out the basis of his conception of the party in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?, explaining that “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” Lenin at the time was fighting against economist “socialists” like LO today, who insisted that the workers could acquire consciousness of their historic tasks spontaneously through their economic struggles. It is because of this economist conception that, throughout May-June 1968, the program VO/LO intervened with never went beyond simple economic demands, only for a few cents more than what the CGT/PCF were asking for. It also explains why, for LO, the whole thing was just a big strike. Like all economists, in the end, they blamed the workers, saying they weren’t ready or conscious enough to struggle for power. But making the working class understand its historic task as the gravedigger of capitalism is the role of the revolutionary party. This also means combating the social backwardness that divides the working class along race lines, something that LO never worried about then—nor does it today.

VO and the Popular Front

Confronted with maneuvers over a new popular front and whether it would be with or without the PCF, VO supported the May 27 rally at Charléty Stadium that was designed to launch a popular front without the PCF. Thus the 28 May Voix Ouvrière described Charléty as a demonstration of 60,000 people “built around ‘far leftist’ demands” and enthused over the slogan “Séguy, traitor,” without mentioning that the same demonstrators started chanting bourgeois politician Mendès-France’s name the moment they saw him.

One of the rare times VO talked about the PCF and the SFIO allying with the bourgeoisie, in a 4 June article in Voix Ouvrière, they reminded us that the left had already been in power twice, adding:

“In the aftermath of World War II the Communist Party and the Socialist Party even had, between them, an absolute majority in the elections. But the SP didn’t want to govern without the MRP [the bourgeois Popular Republican Movement]. So then the PCF rallied to a three-party alliance in the name of unity. Do we have any reason to believe that this parliamentarist ‘left’ that has always gone back on its promises would keep them today? No.”

VO said there was no reason to believe the popular front’s promises, but in reality what the PCF and SP promised was precisely to make an alliance with the bourgeoisie—and that alliance can only be made on the bourgeoisie’s own terms, that is, against the interests of the workers. VO never explained that part because, for them, it is not a question of principle or a class question for workers parties to make such an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

After VO and the other organizations were banned, VO reorganized under the name Lutte Ouvrière on June 24. Three weeks after their June 4 article, in the first issue of Lutte Ouvrière, LO called quasi-explicitly for workers to vote for the very same organizations that were allied with the bourgeoisie or seeking such an alliance. In 2007, at Lutte Ouvrière’s Fête, an event they host every year, François Duburg, one of their historic leaders, got offended and denied it when we pointed that out. But here’s what LO printed between the two rounds of the 1968 parliamentary elections:

“It is however plausible that a large number of voters on the left, disgusted by the attitude of the PCF and the FGDS, who scuttled the general strike, may have abstained on the first round. Maybe those people will vote on the second round so they can express, in spite of everything, their opposition to Gaullism in the only way possible in these elections. Then we would see the left’s vote count go up. That wouldn’t be enough to prevent the UDR [the Gaullist party] from having a majority in the Chamber [the lower house of parliament].

“And that’s too bad! It’s really a shame that the FGDS and PCF can’t rise to power: then their true face as servants of the bourgeoisie would appear clearly before everyone’s eyes….

“Yes, it’s really too bad that they can’t rise to power. And if there’s still time the workers, even if they’re disappointed, must try to send them there [i.e., elect them] on the second round.”

Of course VO wasn’t today’s LO group that has supported counterrevolution in the USSR and in Poland. But this foreshadows their call to vote “without illusions but without reservations” for François Mitterrand in 1981. Now, with the collapse of the USSR and the sharp decline of the level of consciousness in the working class following the “death of communism” campaign, LO’s accommodationism leads them to openly embrace popular-frontism.

As I said, Trotskyists would have called for no vote to the popular-front candidates in the 1968 elections, including members of workers parties running as part of a bourgeois popular front. The fifth issue of the French edition of Spartacist, in May 1974, headlined “Not Only a Stupidity, But a Crime” [see “Not Mitterrand, But a Workers Government!” WV No. 43, 26 April 1974]. Our article attacked the OCI (Pierre Lambert’s organization, a predecessor of the Parti Ouvrier Indépendant) for supporting the Union of the Left’s candidate, Mitterrand, in the first round of the presidential elections in 1974. As for us, in 1974, we gave critical support to LO’s candidate Arlette Laguiller in the first round because she was running against Mitterrand’s popular front, although we warned in advance—and correctly—that LO would probably capitulate to Mitterrand on the second round. In 1977, two years after the Ligue Trotskyste de France was founded, we intervened in the elections calling to abstain except where candidates were running both against the alliance with the bourgeois Left Radicals, and for breaking with the popular front’s “Common Program of Government” for managing capitalism.

Lutte Ouvrière and the Party Question

At the 2008 LO Fête, in a debate between LO and the Pabloites, VO’s 1968 call to build a party that would regroup all revolutionaries came up. The first issues of Lutte Ouvrière, after VO was dissolved, had long articles calling for all “revolutionaries” to regroup. They would even have looked favorably on forming a greater United Socialist Party based on the platform of the Charléty rally, which was for a popular front without the PCF. (See the article in the 31 May issue of Voix Ouvrière, “A ‘Third Force’ on the Left?”) LO argued that thousands of youth and workers were looking for a revolutionary path but were puzzled by the huge number of small groups; “revolutionaries,” whether Trotskyist, Maoist or anarchist, had to come together despite their differences because time was getting short; all “revolutionaries” were up against the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats, and during the strikes they stood arm in arm in spite of their differences. This party had to allow different tendencies to exist, and these tendencies would have the duty to express their differences publicly—in other words it would be a Menshevik party even though they referred to the Bolshevik Party constantly in those articles! Though LO kept talking about the “revolutionary ideas” all these groups shared, not once did they spell out the differences between them, let alone say what political program these groups should unite on.

One can compare that to what Trotsky did in the 1930s, especially from 1933 to 1938, to found the Fourth International. Throughout those years, Trotsky fought over programmatic questions like unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and intransigent struggle against the popular front, which were at the heart of the debates. The result of these years of struggle—at a time when revolutionary events were unfolding as in Spain and France in 1936—was a rock-solid programmatic basis, the Transitional Program, on which the Fourth International was founded. Clearly, LO’s method is quite the opposite of Trotsky’s.

LO’s call was an extension of the permanent liaison committee of the Pabloites and VO that was created on May 19, which is to say, right at the start of the strike. The program of this permanent committee was also utterly economist and very similar to the CGT’s program: a 1,000 franc minimum wage, pay for strike days, union rights in the factories, etc. The only difference from the CGT’s demands was that they added the utopian reformist demand “dissolution of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state.” At that time, the committee already called on all organizations claiming to be Trotskyist to join it.

Our comrades in the Spartacist League/ U.S. wrote about this committee in an article that made the necessary points:

“The axis upon which the VO-Pabloite unity of action is based is a false one. The joint statement called upon ‘all organizations claiming to be Trotskyist to join in this move.’ The VO comrades feel the recent events constitute ‘the French 1905.’ Let us remember that the sequel to the 1905 Russian Revolution was a unification of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks! It took Lenin several years to break this over-fraternal unity.”

And we went on:

“What has been pointed up in France by the latest CP-CGT betrayal is not the need for a ‘Trotskyist regroupment’ but the need for a new revolutionary party based on the vindicated Bolshevik program, uniting all those, even from such tendencies as the Maoists and syndicalists, who stand in favor of workers’ committees of power. We hope that VO, the French Bolsheviks, have not been disoriented as were the Russians in 1905.”

—“To the Brink and Back: French Revolution,” Spartacist No. 12, September-October 1968

The last sentence refers to the fraternal relations we had with VO at the time. We had met VO in 1966 at the London conference of the International Committee of the Fourth International (see Spartacist No. 6, June-July 1966). One of our members went to work with VO/LO in France. By the time she came back to the U.S., she had been won over to VO’s economist political conceptions. We had a fight about this in the party—you can read the main documents in our pamphlet, Lutte Ouvrière and Spark: Workerism and National Narrowness (1988). This fight was against LO’s economism, and therefore about the Leninist conception of the party.

Aftermath of May-June 1968

May ’68 had tremendous international repercussions. In Italy the simmering student revolt culminated in the “hot autumn” of 1969. And then in 1974 the Portuguese revolution took place. In both cases a revolutionary party was lacking, and these opportunities were sold out by the Stalinists and the social democrats with the help of the pseudo-revolutionaries. Then a whole lot of social movements arose in many countries. The whole post ’68 period was full of turmoil. The Stalinists and the social democrats in France, drawing their own lessons from 1968, went on to form the Union of the Left based on the “Common Program of Government” and succeeded, with the help of the pseudo-revolutionaries, in channeling all the struggles into this popular front until it won the elections in 1981.

May ’68 also largely put an end to the left-wing theories that the working class was no longer the revolutionary force in advanced industrial countries. These ideas were widespread during the ’60s among young radical activists to the left of the social-democratic parties in Europe and the Democratic Party in the U.S., but the role the working class played in May-June 1968 debunked them. That was part of what allowed us to recruit rapidly in the U.S., which was the basis for the transformation of the SL/U.S. into a fighting propaganda group. Then we were able to lay the basis for our subsequent international expansion.

Immediately after May ’68, the Pabloites, LO and the Lambertists recruited considerably. They were the only organizations claiming adherence to Trotskyism in continental Europe that numbered several thousand. This massive post-1968 recruitment is the reason these organizations have survived to this day with a large membership. In the years that followed, these groups moved to the right under the pressure of the second Cold War and the anti-Communist crusade led in France by Mitterrand. They all supported the counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet forces in the 1980s as well as the various popular fronts. Their adaptation to and integration into the popular front today is a reflection, on the national terrain, of their abandoning a revolutionary perspective, which had been expressed on the Russian question.

When you draw the right political conclusions from May-June 1968 you understand that the key question in this prerevolutionary situation was the question of a party. The task before us today is to reforge the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky, the world party of revolution, and learn the lessons of 1968. That is the task we are pursuing today. Join us! For new October Revolutions!

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert In The Late 1980s

By Johnny Blade

“Jesus, they charged me fourteen dollars each for these tickets to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Remember Laura about ten or fifteen years ago when we saw Pete for five bucks each at the Café Nana over in Harvard Square (and the price of an expresso coffee for two people and maybe a shared piece of carrot cake since they had been on a date, a cheap date when he didn’t have much cash and at a time when the guy was expected to pay, no “dutch treat,” no Laura dutch treat expected anyway especially on a heavy date, and that one had been when he was intrigued by her early on) and around that same time, that same Spring of 1973, Arlo gave a free concert out on Concord Common,” said Sam Lowell to his date Laura Peters and the couple they were standing in line with, Patrick Darling and Julia James, in front of Symphony Hall in Boston waiting for the doors to open for the concert that evening. This would be the first time Pete and Arlo had appeared together since Newport a number of years back and the first time this first two pairs had seen either of them in a good number of years since Pete had gone to upstate New York and had been spending more time making the rivers and forests up there green again than performing and Arlo was nursing something out in Stockbridge. “Maybe, Alice,” Patrick said and everybody laughed at that inside joke. 

Sam continued along that line of his about “the back in the days” for a while, with the three who were also something of folk aficionados well after the heyday of that music in what Sam called the “1960s folk minute” nodding their heads in agreement saying “things sure were cheaper then and people, folkies for sure, did their gigs for the love of it as much as for the money, maybe more so. Did it, what did Dave Van Ronk call it then, oh yeah, for the “basket,” for from hunger walking around money to keep the wolves from the doors. For a room to play out whatever saga drove them to places like the Village, Harvard Square, North Beach and their itch to make a niche in the booming folk world where everything seemed possible and if you had any kind of voice to the left of Dylan’s and Van Ronk’s, could play three chords on a guitar (or a la Pete work a banjo, a mando, or some other stringed instrument), and write of love, sorrow, some dastardly death deed, or on some pressing issue of the day.”

After being silent for a moment Sam got a smile on his face and said “On that three chord playing thing I remember Geoff Muldaur from the Kweskin Jug Band, a guy who knew the American folk songbook as well as anybody then, worked at learning it too, as did Kweskin, learned even that Harry Smith anthology stuff which meant you had to be serious, saying that if you could play three chords you were sure to draw a crowd, a girl crowd around you, if you knew four or five that  meant you were a serious folkie and you could even get a date from among that crowd, and if you knew ten or twelve you could have whatever you wanted. I don’t know if that is true since I never got beyond the three chord thing but no question that was a way to attract women, especially at parties.” Laura, never one to leave something unsaid when Sam left her an opening said in reply “I didn’t even have to play three chords on a guitar, couldn’t then and I can’t now, although as Sam knows I play a mean kazoo, but all I had to do was start singing some Joan Baez or Judie Collins cover and with my long black hair ironing board straight like Joan’s I had all the boy come around and I will leave it to your imaginations about the whatever I wanted part.” They all laughed although Sam’s face reddened a bit at the thought of her crowded with guys although he had not known her back then but only later in the early 1970s.                     

Those reference got Julia thinking back the early 1960s when she and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. (Sam and Julia were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other but folk music was their bond and despite persistent Julia BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time had never been lovers). She mentioned that to Sam as they waited to see if he remembered and while he thought he remembered he was not sure. He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

Club Blue had been located in that same Harvard Square that Sam had mentioned earlier and along with the Café Nana, which was something of a hot spot once Dylan, Baez, Tom Rush and the members of the Kweskin band started hanging out there, and about five or six other coffeehouses all within a few blocks of each other (one down on Arrow Street was down in the sub-basement and Sam swore that Dylan must have written Subterranean Homesick Blues there). Coffeehouses then where you could, for a dollar or two, see Bob, Joan, Eric (Von Schmidt), Tom (Rush), Phil (Ochs) and lots of lean and hungry performers working for that “basket” Sam had mentioned earlier passed among the patrons and be glad, at least according to Van Ronk when she had asked him about the “take” during one intermission, to get twenty bucks for your efforts that night.

That was the night during that same intermission Dave also told her that while the folk breeze was driving things his way just then and people were hungry to hear anything that was not what he called “bubble gum” music like you heard on AM radio that had not been the case when he started out in the Village in the 1950s when he worked “sweeping out” clubs for a couple of dollars. That sweeping out was not with a broom, no way, Dave had said with that sardonic wit of his that such work was beneath the “dignity” of a professional musician but the way folk singers were used to empty the house between shows. In the “beat”1950s with Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and their comrades (Dave’s word reflecting his left-wing attachments) making everybody crazy for poetry, big be-bop poetry backed up by big be-bop jazz the coffeehouses played to that clientele and on weekends or in the summer people would be waiting in fairly long lines to get in. So what Dave (and Happy Traum and a couple of other singers that she could not remember) did was after the readings were done and people were still lingering over their expressos he would get up on the makeshift stage and begin singing some old sea chanty or some slavery day freedom song in that raspy, gravelly voice of his which would sent the customers out the door. And if they didn’t go then he was out the door. Tough times, tough times indeed.             

Coffeehouses too where for the price of a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry, shared, you could wallow in the fluff of the folk minute that swept America, maybe the world, and hear the music that was the leading edge then toward that new breeze that everybody that Julie and Sam knew was bound to come what with all the things going on in the world. Black civil rights, mainly down in the police state South, nuclear disarmament, the Pill to open up sexual possibilities previously too dangerous or forbidden, and music too, not just the folk music that she had been addicted to but something coming from England paying tribute to old-time blues with a rock upbeat that was now a standard part of the folk scene ever since they “discovered” blues guys like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, and Skip James. All the mix to turn the world upside down. All of which as well was grist to the mill for the budding folk troubadours to write songs about.

Julie made her companions laugh as they stood there starting to get a little impatient since the doors to the concert hall were supposed to open at seven and here it was almost seven fifteen (Sam had fumed, as he always did when he had to wait for anything, a relic of his Army days during the Vietnam War when everything had been “hurry up and wait”). She had mentioned that back then, back in those college days when guys like Sam did not have a lot of money, if worse came to worse and you had no money like happened one time with a guy, a budding folkie poet, Jack Dawson, she had a date with you could always go to the Hayes-Bickford in the Square (the other H-Bs in other locations around Boston were strictly “no-go” places where people actually just went to eat the steamed to death food and drink the weak-kneed coffee). As long as you were not rowdy like the whiskey drunks rambling on and on asking for cigarettes and getting testy if you did not have one for the simple reason that you did not smoke (almost everybody did then including Sam although usually not with her and definitely not in the dorm), winos who smelled like piss and vomit and not having bathed in a while, panhandlers (looking you dead in the eye defying you to not give them something, money or a cigarette but something) and hoboes (the quiet ones of that crowd  who somebody had told her were royalty in the misfit, outcast world and thus would not ask for dough or smokes) who drifted through there you could watch the scene for free. On any given night, maybe around midnight, on weekends later when the bars closed later you could hear some next best thing guy in full flannel shirt, denim jeans, maybe some kind of vest for protection against the cold but with a hungry look on his face or a gal with the de riguer long-ironed hair, some peasant blouse belying her leafy suburban roots, some boots or sandals depending on the weathers singing low some tune they wrote or reciting to their own vocal beat some poem. As Julie finished her thought some guy who looked like an usher in some foreign castle opened the concert hall doors and the four aficionados scampered in to find their seats.                 

…As they walked down the step of Symphony Hall having watched Pete work his banjo magic, work the string of his own Woody-inspired songs like Golden Thread and of covers from the big sky American songbook and Arlo wowed with his City of New Orleans and some of his father’s stuff (no Alice’s Restaurant that night he was saving that for Thanksgiving he said) Sam told his companions, “that fourteen dollars each for tickets was a steal for such performances, especially in that acoustically fantastic hall” and told his three friends that he would stand for coffees at the Blue Parrot over in Harvard Square if they liked. “And maybe share some pastry too.”     

On The 50th Anniversary Of The May Day In France-Our Flag Is Still Red- Reflections On Boston May Day 2010- A Personal Note On Marching With The Black and Red Anarchists

Repost

Sunday, May 02, 2010

*Our Flag Is Still Red- Reflections On Boston May Day 2010- A Personal Note On Marching With The Black and Red Anarchists


Markin comment:


Over the past several years celebrations of our international working class holiday, May Day, not only have we paid tribute to the Chicago Haymarket anarchist martyrs and the struggle for the eight hour day but the hard pressed struggle against the denial of immigrant rights and the attempt by Tea Party-types and other to “close the door” to immigration. This addition reflects the increasingly important role that Hispanics and other militants from the international working class milieu play in the left wing of the American labor movement. Thus, the call for full citizenship rights for those who make it here is an appropriate one on this day.

With this thought in mind I, and a few of the local anti-imperialist activists that I work with marched under that slogan in the 2010 Boston May Day festivities as well as the slogan for the modern equivalent of the eight hour day, especially in these times- “30 For 40”. That slogan, for those not familiar with it, is an algebraic formula, long associated with the Trotskyist movement, although not by any means exclusively raised by us. All we have proposed by the call is the eminently rational solution to unemployment (and underemployment) by spreading the work around so that all have work, and a living wage. Of course the catch is this- it ain’t going to happen under capitalist and so the question of socialism and central planning are starkly posed. And that, after all, is the idea.

What makes all of the above political lead up to my main point interesting, beyond the intrinsic value of such work, is that we found ourselves marching along with a local anarchist collective that had its own set of slogans, and... a marching band. (See linked article.) The whole atmosphere brought back the old days when such musical accompaniment, especially in the old ethnic neighborhoods, were a matter of course on May Day and other left occasions. Now here is the kicker- this group of anarchists marched under the banner of the Haymarket martyrs. That is enough to warm any old militant's heart. And, they were to a man and women, young, very young. Be still my heart, despite our political differences.

Now some may ask why are a confirmed Marxist and his comrades are walking on the same streets as those anarchist partisans. Wrong question, or better, wrong way to pose it. One of the real damaging effects that the variants of historical Stalinism have left on the international working class movement is the hard fact that different political tendencies within the movement are almost literally at war with each other, 24/7/365. To the eternal glee of the capitalists. On the political level those fights are correct. However on our common holidays, like May Day, we should be showing our united face to the international capitalists.

In that sense James P. Cannon, an old Wobblie (IWW), American Communist Party founder and Trotskyist leader had it right. One way he had it right was in his early leadership of the International Labor Defense, an organization dedicated to the struggle to free class war prisoners. All class war prisoners. The other was his long time friendships with those of other working class political tendencies like the great anarchist leader, Carlo Tresca. Hell, he even borrowed money off him. (And eventually paid it back.) I will not go and on about this but let’s leave it at this. After a spring of an anti-war agenda of what looked like a leftist variant of AARP meetings it was such nice to march with the kids. We will get back to the political struggle over differences soon enough.

Labels: Big Bill Haywood, communism, haymarket martyrs, IWW, leon trotsky, may day, stalinism


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“Put Out The Fire In Your Head”- With Patti Griffin’s Not Alone In Mind

“Put Out The Fire In Your Head”- With Patti Griffin’s Not Alone In Mind 

By Bradley Fox, Junior

[Sometimes this generational divide between parent and child that occurs naturally once the younger generation comes of age and begins to make its own way, make its own mistakes, and have its own problems grappling with day to day life in a hectic, dangerous world can only be deciphered by someone from that generation. That is the case here with the story of Sam Lowell’s youngest son, Justin. Sam told me his side of the story, really his take on Jason’s story since Sam had had little directly to do with what got Jason into his difficulties. I tried to write it up as a cautionary tale of sorts to help inform Sam’s, my generation, the generation that the late Peter Markin, our mutual friend who passed on under mysterious circumstances down in Mexico after the 1960s had ebbed and we had lost the cultural battles, called the Generation of ’68  about what was troubling our children. I failed in that effort.

I told my son, Bradley, Junior (with Sam’s permission), who knew Justin when they were younger, the details to see if he could write something that would make sense to Sam and me about what makes their generation tick. As for the grandkids, forget it between the Internet and its subset social media and the trials and tribulations they confront in an extremely dangerous world going forward it would take, as young Bradley told me, the minds of Freud, Einstein, and Rapper Rocco combined to even know what subliminal language they were speaking. Here’s my Bradley’s take on the whole mess [BF, Senior]:      

Justin Lowell had been a late love child of Sam and his third wife since divorced, Rebecca, and as such, with eight years between him and the next youngest child, Brenda, and hence eight years of being the only child at home after she left for college, was pampered by her, cocooned Sam said.  And frankly had been by Sam as well although the number one thing all of his children from his three failed marriages said of him was that he was a good and generous father but he that was a distant figure always off doing some lawyerly business and not around enough to get rid of the that foggy picture of him. But enough of Sam Lowell’s failings since this is about how Justin navigated the world not Sam. 

Of course Justin had all the advantages that accrued to a financially successful small town lawyer’s son from living in a nice large house with his own room (and later own rooms since he took over Brenda’s as well), a good if not great college education (good since Justin was not a particularly studious type like myself and unlike Brenda who gained entrance to Harvard with no problem), and all the diversions that leafy suburban life in Riverdale could bring. All through high school at Riverdale High we were very close buddies so I knew a lot about his make-up, knew too that he resented his mother’s overweening attentions (and as already mentioned Sam’ distance which Justin called indifference unlike my father who went out of his way to be attentive and was a reason why we would spent much more time at my house than his). Many nights out with hot dates we would go wherever we went together, tried out and failed to make the championship Riverdale High School football team, things like that. Mostly though we talked serious stuff about dreams and what we would do when we flew the coop, when we had what Sam and my father always called when they got together and regaled us with their stories the “great jail-break.”          

Naturally after high school, members in good standing of the Riverdale High Class of 1992, when Justin went to State U and I went to NYU since I was desperate to live in New York City and breath the air there as part of my becoming a commercial artist we drew apart. Maybe we would call, see each other at Vinny’s Pizza in town and cut up old touches. That was mainly freshman year when everything was new and fresh, and we were “free.” Then Justin kind of fell off my map as I got involved in some school projects and Justin from what he told me one time at Vinny’s got involved in the furious social life that dominates lots of school out in the boondocks and where kids are away from  home for the first time. That was when Justin, who had hated even the idea of liquor when we were in high school and wouldn’t speak me for a while after l got Kathy Callahan drunk (and horny you can figure the rest out yourselves) on a double date, started doing drugs. Started first I had heard on easy stuff marijuana to be sociable (Justin, me too, as much as we got along with girls were both kind of shy and inward at times which is probably why we gravitated toward each other beyond our fathers knowing each other since their own youth) and bennies to stay up and study for those finals at the last moment. Later senior year I heard from Jack Jamison who had gone to high school with us and was also at State U Justin had graduated to cocaine, serious cocaine, serious enough to have to begin to do some small time dealing to keep up. He did graduate but it was a close thing, very close.         

After college Justin moved to Boston to take a job in a bank, work his way up in the banking industry to make lots of money. In any case in Boston is where he met Melissa, Melissa I won’t give her last name because now she is a big deal in the college administration of an Ivy League college. He met Melissa at the Wild Rose nightclub, the one just outside of Kenmore Square. Met her and quickly came under her spell (a lot of guys had, did, would do that before she was through). Melissa, not a beauty but fetching was one of those women who loved kicks, loved the attention her desire for kicks brought. Her kick at that time was heroin which some previous lover had turned her on to. She something of a manic-depressive as it turned out said grass, coke, pills didn’t do it for her, didn’t put out the fire in her head, the feeling that she could never get close to anybody. (Later it also turned out that she had been sexually abused by her drunken father and had had plenty of reasons to want to put the fire out in her head.) She turned a very willing Justin to smack (it goes by several names, H, snow, the lid, sweet baby, and the like we will just call it smack). H had been having trouble adjusting to having to actually work his ass off to get ahead in the banking industry and he too needed something to put out the fire in his head.

Melissa, as far as anybody ever knew, never got seriously addicted to the smack, maybe cut it enough to keep from going to junkie heaven. Justin of course got himself a jones, a big sleep on his shoulders. He, before too long got fired from his job, went on the bum, started muling down to sunny Mexico for the hard boys to maintain his habit, went back on the bum and finally got picked up by the cops on Commonwealth Avenue trying to break and enter some Mayfair swell condo. All he would tell them beside his name was that he “had to put the fire out in his head,” needed to get well or he was going to jump into the Charles River. At that point, Sam, who was clueless about his son’s drug problems as most parents are until some tripwire turns the lights on had to come into the action, had to defend his youngest son on a damn B&E charge. Got him into a “detox” program too. Did what he could without recrimination, or just a little other than bewilderment that his son would succumb to drugs.                        

Well I wish that I could say that Justin turned it around after that first “detox,” effort but that was not the case. He went through programs for five years before he sobered up for good, or what Sam and Rebecca thought was for good. One night I was home to see my father and to attend our twentieth anniversary class reunion when I ran into Justin on the street who said he would rather not go to the reunion since he would have to explain too many things about his life. He suggested we go into Vinny’s a few blocks up the street and have a couple of slices of pizza and a soda for old times’ sake. We did so and while we were munching away Justin explained as best he could what had happened to him. He reminded me of that night senior year when we were sitting down by the river and he had told me how much he hated his father, hated Sam, since he was such a pious bastard, was almost non-existent in his life, yet Sam tried to be cool about his own bogus jailbreak youth like they, what he kept creepily calling the Generation of ’68, had changed the world, like his youthful coolness made everything alright. I had forgotten about that night, had had my own small (compared to him) troubles adjusting to my own father’s whims. Then Justin said he had spent all that time since that night trying to put out the fire in his head.           

Here comes the sad part, about a year later Justin met a woman, Selina, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where he went to live to get a fresh start. They fell in love, planned to be married, and had made all the arrangements, the church, reception and all. The night before the wedding when he was out with some guys celebrating he went off the bus. Somehow he had made a connection, and before the night was over he was sitting in Prescott Park by himself as the cops came by based on a disturbance yelling “I've got to put the fire in my head out, I’ve got to put the fire in my head out.” Not  a good story but maybe a cautionary tale about how close success and failure to each other when they deal goes down and you are all alone to sniff it out.             

Murder Anyway You Cut It, Neo-Film Noir Style - With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

Murder Anyway You Cut It, Neo-Film Noir Style - With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

By Zack James

Phil Larkin, the locally well-known private investigator from Gloversville about sixty miles west of Boston, loved to go to the National Private Investigators Association (NPIA) annual conventions. Go not so much to inspect the inevitable new technological gizmos which were touted as the P.I.s next best friend by their producers but to gather up old acquaintances and over a few whiskies to find out about some new interesting case one of them was working on. By the way they are not all interesting by any means whatever the individual P.I. might be hyping about by virtue of his or her prowess in solving the riddle of the age –usually some missing husband who was ready to go home after a couple of months with some floozie who told all his dough and blew for places unknown. Or about a case they might have heard about. That is how he heard from his old friend Artie Shaw about the Beck case, the case that had half the public coppers, gendarmes they call them there, in France baffled and Artie too. That is until things fell into place by virtue of that over-rated prowess that every P.I. hung out like single in front of his or her shabby sixth floor office in some seen its day office building filled with failed dentists, cheapjack insurance agents, seedy repo men and discount wholesale jewelers. The corridors smelling of whisky and urine and the elevator chugging along like the slow boat to China.

(By the way for those who are confused, or only know of the more famous American Forensic Investigators Organization (AFIO), the one the famous detectives Jack Dolan, Robert Parker, and Shane Chandler, the latter a distant relative of the crime writer Raymond who along with Dashiell Hammett practically invented the hard-boiled detective genre that has misled several generations of readers and average citizens about the real lives of P.I.s, belong to, the NPIA and AFIO work two very different tracks. The AFIO had split, an acrimoniously split, from the NPIA over the issue of working with the public coppers. The NPIA historically had deferred, meaning “butted out on,” once a case went onto the police blotter. The AFIO made up of a bunch of “hot-doggers” who spit on the public coppers and their half-ass work went on the premise that all cases were better done through private hands. Phil an old- time public cop himself would have been railroaded out of business in Gloversville if he had made step one to mess with the open police cases in that town.

Every NPIA member in attendance could hardly wait for the banquet Saturday night that closed each convention to hear the words, to hear the deep dark secret of the profession that the difference between the actual numbers of cases between the two organizations was minuscule or NPIA’s policies were better. The reality was that despite the few headline cases like the Galton kidnaping out in California, the Hardman serial murder case and the Dreen strange way to die case which some guy by the name of Lew Archer solved out of the air and that was really the last we heard of him until recently when some foolish kids tried unsuccessfully to get him into the P.I. Hall of Fame there was as much co-operation between the AFIO and public coppers as the NPIA.)             

Artie, originally from Boston, had worked with Phil when he had started out on a couple of cases, key-hole peeping cases which in the 1950s was bread and butter work for most private detectives in the days when getting a divorce was heavy lifting without an army of reasons adultery being the primo reason a court would accept for breaking up marriages allegedly made in heaven for eternity on to stick on the good green for that long. Phil eventually moved on from that work saying to anybody who would listen that he would rather try to solve mass murder cases, solve serial murder stuff, stuff that put in immediate harm and imminent danger than have to swallow the lies associated with guys and gals shacking up. Less strain on the nerves. Artie, knowing his limitations, always stuck with key-hole peeping figuring with fewer guys pursuing that end of the business would leave more work for him. It was after a successful key-hole peeing assignment how in a roundabout way he got the Beck case. The wife of big Boston international banker had hired him to get the goods on her husband and his French mistress whom said banker had established in a Paris apartment for when he travelled there on business. Artie, really a pro then at getting the dope, getting the photos necessary to close a divorce case in court, rapped that one up tight, no problem. What Artie had found out in Paris as the 1950s turned into the 1960s was that there was still much key-hole peeping work to found there through the still pretty much intact cumbersome French Napoleonic civil code and so he stayed around there to pick up the pieces, especially when that Boston banker’s divorcee set up herself in Montmatre.       

That banker’s ex-wife connection got him the Beck case, got it to him at least indirectly through her lawyer in Paris who was also the lawyer that this Doctor Beck had retained once he got into serious trouble, or rather  and his sister, Anne, a devotee of the horsey set, but loaded with dough from her husband’s fortune had retained. The motives for the banker’s ex-wife to stick her neck out were mysterious at the time and are still so although nobody has ruled out an affair between the pair or more probably that Beck had had a short affair with that little whore her ex-husband had set up in an elegant Paris apartment overlooking the Seine. The case would have seemed to be on the face of it way over Artie’s head as it involved a “cold case,” a case that the French gendarmes had closed up tight. But the ex-banker’s wife and Beck’s lawyer both agreed that a non-French P.I. would have less hurdles to cross than some Parisian private dick who was bound by law to turn everything over to the coppers under penalty of losing his or her license. (Artie was working off his U.S. permit courtesy of influence with the public coppers by a friend of that banker’s ex-wife).

Adding to the stones against him Artie had moreover gotten on the case after the thing had been dead for about seven, eight years. Years after this Doctor Beck was cleared as far as could be of his wife’s murder out in the country while they were out for a swim on the lake. The doctor’s story then had been that he had been knocked unconscious by a party (or parties) unknown and dumped in the lake when he heard his wife’s screams. Except he was found on the dock. As such things went the public coppers had to let it go when they couldn’t shake his story and his wife’s father, a public copper himself, identified his daughter’s body and vouched for his son-in-law.            

Then a couple of bodies surfaced in that same area and a couple of cops from the old case started to put two and two together and come up with the doctor. The frame was on but the point was how was Artie to get enough evidence to get the doctor off the hook. As it turned out a couple of pieces of evidence surfaced that got the ball rolling. The doctor’s wife, who along with his sister were seriously into steeplechase horse shows, had been beaten badly by someone a few weeks prior to her death. The coppers figured that Doc beck did the deed, a wife-beater not uncommon among certain high profile types then, or now. As it turned out the Doctor’s wife, Margot was her name, had had his sister take photographs of the wounds but had also swore her to secrecy that this horse set guy, this Phillip Neuville, the son of Baron Neuville, a guy with a pile of money as well had done the beating when she confronted him with evidence of child sexual abuse of a bunch of kids who worked the stables as a part of program she was involved with.      

That confrontation as it turned out resulted in the death of young Philipp. the photographs were taken after the Doc’s wife had killed the bastard. Nowadays in order for a thriller to pass muster there have to be many little twists and turns or else the film get very tedious, get very boring, never gets, as a friend of my who is into both written and cinematic thrillers has suggested, off the slow-moving track which spells death to the film, makes one reach for the remote very quickly. That is not the case with the thriller under review, the French film, Tell No One, although frankly I thought that the film would in its opening scenes succumb to that slow-moving death every thriller has to dodge.

Here are the twists in this “cold file” case. Doctor Beck’s wife, Margot, had been killed, senselessly killed by a serial killer, several years earlier and he was just beginning to put his life back together when a whole ton of hell started coming down on his head. Reason: a couple of male bodies filled with bullets had been found out in the country where his wife had been killed. Beck had just barely gotten out of the clutches of the law back then since the law thought under the odd-ball evidence in the case that he was the mastermind behind the deed. He had been mysteriously found unconscious on the dock despite his allegations that he had been hit and fallen into the water by the killer being a chief reason that he had been suspected by the cops.    

Lots of things begin to pop up that had the cops interested in reopening the case, hoping to see the big frame placed around his head. Unaccounted for bruises to his wife’s face on photos that survived, a gun found in secret place in his house, the murder most foul of his wife’s best friend are just some of the examples that dogged him. Put those together with Beck’s taking it on the lam to figure out what the hell was going on and for the average cop never mind what country he or she works in and you have and open and shut case of consciousness of guilt and an easy and early wrap-up to the cases. Put the bugger to death or give him life but make short work of it as the court  dockets in France as just as overloaded as in the United States.

But hold on. This Doctor Beck actually loved his wife, was not faking the trouble he had trying to put his life back together. Something else was going on, some nefarious plot to get him to take the big step-off and let him rot in prison forgotten after a while. Not only was something going on in the frame department but the good doctor was getting information via his e-mail that his wife was still alive. Two trails of events were going on at the same time (always a good sign in a thriller): the net tightening over his head by the coppers and his frenzy to find his wife knowing now that she probably was not dead. That’s all I will tell you because I have been asked to “tell no one” in order not to spoil the ending, okay. Except old Doc Beck was not crazy, was not wrong in assuming that nefarious forces were out to get him although it would take a while before he learned that it was because of something that Margot had knowledge about shortly before her “death” which had people in high places ready, willing and able to do her in just like the intrigues under the ancien regime, the Napoleonic times or the ill-fated Third Republic. Watch this award-winning film. Watch Artie coming up on the high side for once.   

That Is Where The Dough Is-I Think-Denzel Washington’s “Inside Man” (2006)-A Film Review

That Is Where The Dough Is-I Think-Denzel Washington’s “Inside Man” (2006)-A Film Review

In honor of legendary bank robber Willie Sutton 

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin 

Inside Man, Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, directed by mad monk Spike Lee, 2006    

Recently my old amigo, my friend Sam Lowell from the old working class Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville where such things were common currency did a film review of Colin Firth’s The Gambit where by guile and intricate plan he was able to bamboozle a nasty art collector billionaire out of his prized Monet and made a cool twelve million-pounds, British money right, without working up a sweat. Sam mentioned that in the old-fashioned old days to grab that amount of dough you had to, well, rob a bank. He mentioned the famed bank robber Willie Sutton had made the immortal remark when asked why he robbed banks-“that was where the money was.” We spent many a corner boy larcenous night regaling ourselves with that hard fact although our thing, our “where the money was,” was much lower on the food chain-the midnight creep (don’t ask for details and I will tell no lies besides who knows if the statute of limitations has run out or some still standing owner is mad as hell and wants his or her pound of flesh-mine).  And Willie’s remark was -and is as the film under review Denzel Washington’s Inside Man apparently tries to show again- still has a place in the cinema if much more dangerous in the real world and so Colin Firth probably was much better off with his white collar clean hands heist.        

It is funny how I got this review which will give the reader some insight into how this publication business works. Frank Jackman recently did a film review on Woody Allen’s Whatever Works which had a main storyline about intergenerational sex. The rub is that Frank got picked for that assignment by current site manager Greg Green after he, Greg, had looked at the archives and noted that Frank had done a series of pieces about my experience a few years ago with a young Penn State graduate student whom I am still in touch with although we are no longer lovers since the long distance trips were killing me and she was get antsy for a younger guy I think. Of course I wasn’t about to be selected for that review since I would have slanted it too much one way even though I asked to do it. Greg threw me a bone by giving me this one when he mentioned that it involved an intricately planned bank robbery which is where you came in and why I am dedicating this review to our hero Willie Sutton.

Let’s follow the bouncing ball (I will not use Sam’s classic “here’s the skinny” now that his longtime companion Laura has taken it up as a lead-in to summary as well in her reviews). Russell, played by Clive Owen, reels us in by telling us that he will/he has committed the perfect crime-the perfect bank robbery so I am all ears. (That will-has a combo since he opens and closes the film with that remark.) The upfront idea is that he will rob a bank in New York City, on Wall Street, using the classic, movie classic, working class guys doing their work as a front to avoid attention. Bang. The quartet takes hostages and the games begin after terrorizing the staff and customers in their charge making them all wear similar clothing including the quartet.         

Enter NYPD all ablaze to set up a perimeter and “do the do” on this situation which we know from a million films is to cordon everything off and deal with the craziness. Enter “on the ropes” Detective Frazier, played by Denzel Washington, and his partner who are the NYPD’s hostage negotiators. Russell and the detective play the usual cat and mouse game around demands and the safety of the hostages. In the meantime a “fixer” woman, played by Jodie Foster, is hired by the president of the bank, played by ancient and million film credits Christopher Plummer who has a big secret he wants kept under wraps, way under wraps. He has a very seedy and wretched past having worked for the Nazis and stolen diamonds and stuff from a Jewish friend whom he turned in the scumbag. Yes he wants that safety deposit box where the evidence is kept kept very secret.

Meanwhile back to the cat and mouse game between the detective and Russell. In the end the NYPD frustrated by the goings on decide to storm the bank after a confrontation with the bad guys who push the hostages out the front door. Guess what after the coppers search the place they find no bodies, no criminals and-no money taken. Frazier can’t figure it out at first but then realizes more is going on, much more. Without given that away while you are following the bouncing ball go back and think through about that bank president and his past and that will help. In the end though the crime is perfect-as far as it goes. Of course beloved and thorough Willie Sutton if he had had to go through so much effort would have cleaned that vault out-pronto.

You’ve Got Mail-James Stewart’s The Shop Around The Corner (1940)-A Film Review

You’ve Got Mail-James Stewart’s The Shop Around The Corner (1940)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

The Shop Around The Corner, starring James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, based on the play by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo, 1940

Sometimes you just have to concede defeat in this movie reviewing business. Granted I don’t do nearly as many film reviews as I used when I started out slaving away for Greg Green when he was over at American Film Gazette but I still keep my hand in and believe that I can figure out what old boss Sam Lowell called the “hook” on a story. This film, The Shop Around The Corner, baffles me though as I will explain in a minute. Even Sam’s old chestnut about looking at the “slice of life” aspect if all else fails fails here since there is no “slice of life” aspect that an American audience would gravitate to so we are left with the holy of holies-the boy meets girl story line that has saved a million Hollywood movies and two million film reviews. I never liked to pitch a movie that way by there you have it. By the way Seth Garth told me when he reviewed Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’ You’ve Got Mail in 1998 which is based on the same play by Hungary playwright Miklos Laszlo he had the same befuddlement (his term) and was reduced to the formula boy meets girl last desperate gasp.            

Here’s where the dilemma comes in right from the first scene. We are supposed to believe this whole story takes place in a luxury goods shop on a downtown street in Budapest, Hungary in the 1930s but from the get-go this stage scene could have been anywhere, any city in the world, except for the few signs in Serbo-Croatian or Magyar or whatever language those guys and gals speak. Moreover the lead characters Klara Novik, played by Margaret Sullavan, and Alfred Kralik, played by James Stewart are straight out the central committee of WASP nation so the whole feel is wrong. You can see why I too am befuddled.       

So down in the mud to that “boy meets girl” sinkhole-with a twist. Klara and Alfred have “met” through, no, not the Internet that is today’s method among some, a personal ad in a newspaper and have been cheerfully corresponding via, no, not e-mails, that too is today’s method but letters via a post office box drop. They have many interests in common but as we rev up they have never met. We learn all of this second hand when Alfred, lead salesman in the leather goods shop, tells a sympathetic fellow employee about his good fortune. For years the owner, an onsite owner, has relied on Alfred to keep his business afloat which he has done despite occasional differences (although why the owner has so many employees in such a small and for most of the film almost empty shop is another conundrum producer).        

The way Alfred and Klara “meet” in person (without knowing they are co-correspondents) is the day when Klara shows up looking for work and she is able to con the owner in hiring her. Naturally to maintain some kind of dramatic tension they don’t like each other and harbor romantic feelings only for the phantom “other” co-correspondent who ultimately agree to meet in a public place (good idea). The works get jammed up though through a subplot where the wife of the owner is having an affair with a womanizing employee (who would seem to be number one to let go just to cut labor costs) who the owner mistakenly thinks is Alfred. Alfred gets the sack, for a while. As it turned out the owner had hired detectives to follow the wife and that was the end of that caddish womanizer and the return of Alfred as a manager since the owner was so distraught he had attempted suicide. Had been hospitalized and told to take life easier.  

But back to Klara and Alfred. Through a happenstance, nice word right, Alfred finds out Klara is his pen pal. What to do, what to do. As it turned out Alfred had romantic feelings for Klara as pen pal or as fellow employee and he plays that card for a while before he finally clues her in that he, she have been correspondents-and soon to be lovers. Yeah, classic boy meets girl stuff in Budapest, or Bucharest. Yawn.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Out Of The Be-Bop Film Noir Night- The Crime Noir “Kansas City Confidential”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime film noir, Kansas City Confidential.


DVD Review


Kansas City Confidential, John Payne, Preston Foster, Coleen Gray, Jack Elam, directed by Phillip Karlson, United Artists, 1952


I have said this many times. Sure I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background, and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh ya, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Kansas City Confidential, is in the former category.

And why shouldn’t it be. One fall guy Joe (fall guys seem always to be named Joe, regular Joes I guess), played here in a understated way by John Payne, a little the worst for wear in post-World War II America, having had a few legal problems of his own, gets caught up in the dragnet after a major heist (over a million dollars, a lot of money then but just pocket change today) of a bank, in of all places Kansas City. Now all of this, aside from the criminal intent and cash reward, has been set-up by a disgruntled, vengeful ex-cop (played by Preston Foster) who masterminds the whole thing. Of course such a major heist then (as now) requires several, um, “associates”, in this case masked associates (for their own and Foster's self-protection against the dreaded “stoolie’ syndrome. Said associates are not anyone you or I would want to hang around with, these guys are strictly losers, especially one grafter extraordinaire, Pete Harris, played to manic perfection by Jack Elam. (The others are perennial bad guys Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand).

Now Joe, as one might expect, takes umbrage, yes, umbrage at having taken a beating from the cops, and also for being set up as the fall guy. So, naturally, as any crime noir hero worth his salt would do, he is going to get to the bottom of this thing come hell or high water. And the rest of the plot line centers of following the clues, and following the sun to sunny Mexico (low film budget faux Mexico, to be sure) to undo the bad guys, and maybe catch a reward. Or at least a stray gringa or senorita. Naturally he does, the gringa part anyway, although she turns out to be mastermind ex-cop’s daughter (law student daughter, by the way, played by Coleen Gray). Other than the inevitable tacky ending ( I won’t spoil your fun by telling what it is) this one moves along nicely, is filled with some nice twists, and is, as usual with black and white noir films great on those shadowy takes which reveal evil in the making. Especially those loser, grifter, chain-smoking Jack Elam takes. Some noirs you watch for the magic camera work, some for the femme fatales that drive the story line, some for the tough guys and their gaff. This one you get for the plot line.