Thursday, April 19, 2012
Tax Day Activities In Boston-April 17th 2012- Report And Pictures
Click on headline to link to an entry for Tax Day Activities In Boston-April 17th 2012- Report And Pictures from The South End Patch.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Remember Jackson State"-"Workers Vanguard" (April 5, 1985)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State
Atlanta, GA 16 February
Editor, Workers Vanguard
Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly thoroughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of students were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropriately mentioned, we should remember that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, February 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).
Comradely, Joe Vetter
P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State
Atlanta, GA 16 February
Editor, Workers Vanguard
Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly thoroughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of students were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropriately mentioned, we should remember that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, February 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).
Comradely, Joe Vetter
P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.
From The Pages Of The International Communist League-Le Bolchévik nº 199-Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Le Bolchévik nº 199
Mars 2012
Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire multiethnique !
21 février – Le président de la République française est le chef de l’exécutif, c’est-à-dire le dirigeant exécutif de l’Etat capitaliste, responsable en chef pour défendre les intérêts des capitalistes dans leur ensemble. Doté de pouvoirs exorbitants selon la Constitution issue du coup d’Etat gaulliste de 1958, le « chef de l’Etat » peut à volonté décréter la loi martiale, dissoudre le parlement, etc. Il est officiellement chef des armées, celles qui ont tué directement ou indirectement, rien que l’année dernière, peut-être des milliers de personnes en Côte d’Ivoire, en Libye, en Afghanistan et ailleurs. L’Etat est le comité exécutif de la classe dirigeante ; en son cœur il consiste en des bandes d’hommes armés (flics, armée, prisons, tribunaux) chargés de maintenir, grâce à leur monopole de la violence, le système de production basé sur l’esclavage salarié.
Comme le montre toute l’expérience chèrement acquise par le prolétariat international depuis les révolutions de 1848, la classe ouvrière, qui produit les richesses et surtout les profits qu’empochent les capitalistes, ne peut pas simplement mettre la main sur l’Etat capitaliste et l’utiliser pour son propre compte. Elle devra pour s’affranchir, et affranchir du même coup l’ensemble des opprimés, détruire l’Etat capitaliste et le remplacer par sa propre machine de répression des capitalistes récalcitrants : la dictature du prolétariat. Karl Marx avait tiré avec force cette leçon de la Commune de Paris, et Lénine l’avait confirmée avec la victoire de la Révolution russe d’octobre 1917. Nous luttons pour construire un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire du type de celui des bolchéviks de Lénine, indispensable à la victoire de la révolution.
Le prolétariat fait directement tourner les moyens de production : usines, mines, moyens de transport, etc. Aussi, lui seul a la puissance sociale, et l’intérêt objectif, pour prendre la tête de tous les opprimés et balayer le système capitaliste, ici et dans le monde entier. La révolution socialiste jettera les bases d’une économie planifiée rationnellement pour satisfaire les besoins et non pour fournir des profits. Un développement énorme des forces productives permettra d’avancer vers l’élimination de la pauvreté et de la pénurie et vers la création d’une société socialiste égalitaire.
Il découle de notre position révolutionnaire que nous marxistes refusons par principe d’occuper des postes exécutifs de l’Etat, car cela reviendrait à prendre la responsabilité pour mettre en œuvre l’appareil de répression capitaliste. Nous le refusons à tous les niveaux : depuis celui du président de la République en passant par les membres du gouvernement capitaliste, les préfets et jusqu’aux maires de villages, qui représentent l’Etat capitaliste au niveau des municipalités et disposent pour cela d’une série de pouvoirs, y compris des pouvoirs de police. Et il en découle aussi que nous refusons par principe de présenter des candidats à l’élection de tels postes. En effet, s’y présenter implique, qu’on le veuille ou non, que l’on est prêt à accepter de telles responsabilités, quels que soient les démentis que l’on puisse faire par avance. Cela ne peut que conférer une légitimité aux conceptions réformistes les plus répandues sur l’Etat, en donnant à penser que l’élection d’un « révolutionnaire » à la tête de l’Etat pourrait faire avancer les intérêts des travailleurs, voire nous faire l’économie d’une révolution (voir notre article « A bas les postes exécutifs de l’Etat capitaliste ! Principes marxistes et tactiques électorales », paru dans Spartacist édition française n° 39, été 2009).
Pour l’indépendance de classe du prolétariat ! A bas le front populaire !
Les marxistes peuvent toutefois envisager de donner un soutien critique à une autre organisation, même dans des élections présidentielles, du moment que cela peut faire avancer d’une manière ou d’une autre la conscience de classe du prolétariat. Mais dans les élections présentes, il n’y a personne à qui les marxistes puissent ne serait-ce qu’envisager de donner un soutien critique, car tous les candidats se réclamant peu ou prou du mouvement ouvrier sont dans le meilleur des cas une caution de gauche au candidat du PS et contribuent ainsi à alimenter des illusions dans le « changement » qu’il apporterait.
Tout ce que celui-ci, François Hollande, a promis, c’est de faire du sarkozysme « normal », sans bling-bling. En ouverture de sa campagne électorale, il s’est prononcé contre la tactique de l’« essuie-glace » (débat sur France 2, 26 janvier), c’est-à-dire qu’il n’effacera pas les attaques qu’a subies la classe ouvrière en dix ans de pouvoir de la droite. Hollande s’est engagé à priver de leurs droits à la retraite à taux plein tous ceux qui n’ont pas effectivement travaillé au moins 41 ans. Toute une partie de la bourgeoisie est excédée par Sarkozy – non pas tant par sa vulgarité tape-à-l’œil de nouveau riche que par le fait qu’il n’a pas rempli ses promesses de casser le mouvement ouvrier et spectaculairement gonfler le taux de profit des capitalistes. L’impérialisme français continuant de perdre du terrain par rapport à son rival allemand, il est impératif pour lui que son prochain commandant en chef mette en œuvre des attaques encore plus radicales contre la classe ouvrière et les opprimés. Hollande aurait l’avantage pour les capitalistes de bénéficier du soutien des bureaucrates syndicaux, qu’il a promis de « consulter » et de flatter en tant que « partenaires sociaux » pour diriger l’impérialisme français. Aucun vote pour François Hollande !
Hollande a aussi promis une lutte « implacable » contre les sans-papiers. Il a promis une « solution » pour les Roms en les mettant dans des « camps » pour « éviter que nous connaissions cette circulation encore et encore » (le Monde, 18 février). Une « solution finale » ? Il a promis d’embaucher plus de flics, attaquant de la droite Sarkozy sur un bilan « sécuritaire » insuffisant. Il a promis d’embaucher 60 000 personnes dans l’éducation – en les prenant sur d’autres postes dans la fonction publique et en pérennisant ainsi le tiers des 90 000 suppressions d’emplois pratiquées dans l’éducation par la droite ces dernières années.
S’il a promis de retirer les troupes françaises d’Afghanistan – que le gouvernement Jospin-Mélenchon avait envoyées il y a dix ans, avec Hollande comme chef du PS ! – c’est du point de vue des intérêts bien compris de l’impérialisme français : les pertes militaires subies ne justifient plus l’« avantage » de pouvoir entraîner les troupes à tuer de vraies personnes et de pouvoir négocier des contreparties avec les USA pour ses propres capitalistes. D’ailleurs Hollande a personnellement exprimé son soutien aux interventions militaires sanglantes de l’impérialisme français, organisées par Sarkozy, en Côte d’Ivoire et en Libye. Troupes françaises, hors d’Afghanistan, hors d’Afrique, hors du Liban, hors des Balkans, hors de la péninsule arabique !
François Hollande se présente de plus comme le candidat commun du PS et du Parti radical de gauche, un parti bourgeois. Ce genre de coalition est un « front populaire », un bloc entre partis ouvriers-bourgeois (des partis comme le PS ou le PCF ayant des liens avec le mouvement ouvrier et se réclamant d’une façon ou d’une autre de celui-ci, bien que leur direction et leur programme soient complètement bourgeois) et partis de la classe dominante, où ce sont inévitablement ces derniers qui donnent le caractère de classe de l’alliance, servant de garantie à la bourgeoisie que la coalition servira loyalement les capitalistes.
Les partis bourgeois servent aussi d’alibi aux réformistes pour leur propre programme bourgeois ; ainsi, le PCF prétendait encore en 1936 qu’il était pour des soviets (dans un avenir indéfini), mais concrètement il prônait un programme ultra modéré afin de préserver à tout prix l’alliance avec les « radicaux-socialistes » d’Edouard Herriot, le parti capitaliste par excellence de la Troisième République. Aujourd’hui le PS ne cache pas son programme bourgeois derrière les Radicaux, mais ceux-ci, ainsi que le parti bourgeois soi-disant « progressiste » des Verts avec qui le PS a déjà passé des accords électoraux pour les législatives, peuvent lui servir d’assurance en cas de soulèvement ouvrier, comme en Juin 36. Depuis cent ans, les partis ouvriers réformistes en France n’ont jamais gouverné sans faire un bloc de ce type avec des partis bourgeois.
En enchaînant les travailleurs à leur ennemi de classe, les alliances de front populaire pavent toujours la voie à la défaite, et c’est pourquoi c’est une question de principe pour les marxistes de s’y opposer. Le Front populaire de Juin 36 avait fini avec Pétain, celui d’Espagne la même année avec la dictature franquiste pendant près de quarante ans, celui du Chili avec le coup d’Etat de Pinochet en 1973. Dans le cycle ouvert par Mitterrand en 1981, le front populaire s’est chaque fois terminé par un retour en force de la réaction cinq ans plus tard, avec l’enracinement des fascistes du Front national.
Nous refusons également de donner le moindre soutien aux candidats de la « gauche de la gauche ». Les sociaux-démocrates du Parti communiste (PC) et du Parti de gauche (PG) se sont unis derrière Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ancien cadre de longue date du Parti socialiste qui avait occupé y compris un strapontin ministériel dans les dernières années du gouvernement Jospin, celui qui s’était vanté d’avoir effectué plus de privatisations que tous les gouvernements de droite précédents. Le PC et le PG se sont engagés avec force et inconditionnellement à « battre la droite » au deuxième tour, c’est-à-dire en clair à voter Hollande. Ils servent ainsi de simples rabatteurs de voix pour le front populaire.
C’est également le rôle du NPA d’Olivier Besancenot et Philippe Poutou ; d’ailleurs une bonne partie du NPA est en train de passer avec armes et bagages chez Mélenchon pour soutenir d’encore plus près le front populaire (et se rapprocher des sinécures que promet une victoire de la « gauche » aux élections). Quant à la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, Nathalie Arthaud, elle refuse pour le moment de s’opposer au vote Hollande – ces opportunistes avaient appelé au soir du premier tour des élections de 2007 à voter pour Ségolène Royal. Nous appelons les travailleurs à ne pas voter aux élections présidentielles, ni au premier ni au deuxième tour.
Ni, de même, aux législatives qui suivront. Lénine décrivait ainsi le parlementarisme :
« Décider périodiquement, pour un certain nombre d’années, quel membre de la classe dirigeante foulera aux pieds, écrasera le peuple au Parlement, telle est l’essence véritable du parlementarisme bourgeois, non seulement dans les monarchies constitutionnelles parlementaires, mais encore dans les républiques les plus démocratiques. »
– l’Etat et la révolution (1917)
Toutefois, à la différence des présidentielles, les marxistes peuvent envisager de se présenter aux législatives pour utiliser la campagne électorale et, s’ils sont élus, la tribune du parlement pour faire de la propagande en tant qu’oppositionnels, c’est-à-dire opposés à l’exécutif capitaliste quels qu’en soient les détenteurs. Il s’agit de faire de la propagande révolutionnaire, agissant comme des tribuns de la classe ouvrière et des opprimés.
A bas l’Union européenne capitaliste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
On peut voir très clairement sur l’Union européenne combien le programme du PS est chauvin et anti-ouvrier. L’Union européenne est une formation entièrement réactionnaire, un consortium d’Etats impérialistes et d’Etats plus faibles, dirigé par l’Allemagne. L’objectif initial de ses prédécesseurs, la Communauté européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier, l’Europe des Six, etc., était de renforcer la cohésion économique de l’Europe occidentale, essentiellement la France et l’Allemagne, pour garantir la solidité de l’OTAN, le bloc militaire capitaliste contre l’Union soviétique. Le PS de Mitterrand-Mélenchon n’a pas peu contribué dans les années 1980 à la victoire de la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, alors que nous, trotskystes, étions pour la défense militaire inconditionnelle de l’URSS. Pendant que la gauche en général, du PS à Lutte ouvrière, se réjouissait de la perspective d’une réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, nous avions lutté en 1989-1990 contre l’absorption de l’Etat ouvrier déformé est-allemand par l’Allemagne de l’Ouest capitaliste et pour une réunification révolutionnaire de l’Allemagne, au moyen d’une révolution politique prolétarienne contre la bureaucratie stalinienne parasitaire est-allemande, et d’une révolution socialiste à l’Ouest pour renverser et exproprier la bourgeoisie allemande.
L’URSS maintenant détruite, l’Union européenne (UE) est un simple bloc commercial entre des puissances impérialistes concurrentes, essentiellement l’Allemagne, la France et la Grande-Bretagne, qui se sont fait deux fois la guerre entre elles rien qu’au siècle dernier pour la suprématie en Europe et pour arracher à leurs rivales des parts de marché au niveau mondial. Le seul objet de l’UE est de soi-disant promouvoir la « concurrence libre et non faussée » (alors que le capitalisme a atteint depuis plus de cent ans l’ère des cartels et des monopoles). C’est une couverture idéologique pour des attaques croissantes contre les acquis que les travailleurs avaient pu arracher par leurs luttes à l’époque où l’Union soviétique existait encore. Ainsi, la directive antisyndicale Bolkestein visait à mettre davantage en concurrence les travailleurs des différents pays d’Europe les uns contre les autres ; comme nous l’écrivions dans un tract (reproduit dans le Bolchévik n° 175, mars 2006), « la directive Bolkestein va droit au cœur de ce qu’est l’Union européenne ». Plus récemment, nous soulignions dans le dernier Bolchévik (décembre 2011) :
« L’UE est une construction fragile, exposée aux tensions constamment engendrées par la divergence des intérêts nationaux des impérialistes européens ; ces tensions menacent constamment de la faire éclater. Il ne peut en être autrement. Les forces productives ont depuis longtemps débordé du cadre national, et pourtant le capitalisme est un système qui repose fondamentalement sur les Etats-nations : chacune des différentes classes capitalistes nationales a besoin d’avoir son propre Etat pour promouvoir et défendre ses intérêts à l’intérieur et à l’étranger. De ce fait, sous le capitalisme, une union politique, ou un super-Etat européen, est un objectif nécessairement réactionnaire en même temps qu’une utopie fumeuse. »
Aussi, la Ligue communiste internationale s’est toujours opposée à l’Union européenne et son instrument monétaire, l’euro. En mai 1997, alors que se finalisaient les négociations interimpérialistes pour la création de l’euro, nous écrivions dans un tract qui appelait à ne pas voter pour le front populaire Jospin-PCF : « Si demain, face aux luttes ouvrières, l’“union monétaire” était abandonnée ou repoussée aux calendes grecques, ce serait une victoire pour les travailleurs, qui dans toute l’Europe, opposent une résistance acharnée à l’offensive capitaliste. » Nous expliquions à l’époque qu’une monnaie unique n’est pas viable en l’absence d’un gouvernement européen unique, et celui-ci « ne peut être réalisé que par les méthodes d’Adolf Hitler, et non par celles de Jacques Delors, l’architecte social-démocrate français de Maastricht » – et père de Martine Aubry, aujourd’hui dirigeante du PS (voir le Bolchévik n° 143, été 1997).
Si Hollande s’oppose à Sarkozy sur la question de l’Europe, c’est uniquement du point de vue des intérêts de l’impérialisme français, pas ceux des travailleurs. Hollande reproche à Sarkozy de s’être couché devant les rivaux allemands de la France ; il est allé à Londres pour non seulement rassurer les financiers de la City qu’ils n’avaient rien à craindre de ses discours contre « le monde de la finance », mais aussi pour plaider pour un resserrement des liens franco-britanniques face à l’Allemagne. Hollande n’a par exemple nullement l’intention de revenir sur les conditions imposées par Merkel et Sarkozy à la Grèce, menant celle-ci à l’asphyxie et plongeant son peuple littéralement dans la misère – et jetant les bases pour aggraver les attaques contre les travailleurs dans le reste de l’Europe, y compris en Allemagne et en France.
En France, l’Union européenne et l’euro sont une affaire où les sociaux-démocrates ont toujours joué un rôle décisif. Pour essayer de garder des leviers sur l’Allemagne, Mitterrand avait négocié avec le chancelier Kohl en décembre 1989 une monnaie commune en échange de son accord pour la réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, qui allait inévitablement à terme renforcer la puissance de l’Allemagne par rapport à la France. Il avait fait voter par référendum en 1992 le traité de Maastricht instituant l’euro (le « oui » ne l’avait emporté que de justesse, grâce notamment au vote de Mélenchon et à l’abstention de Lutte ouvrière). L’euro lui-même a été introduit sous le gouvernement PS-PC-Verts de Jospin, auquel prit part Mélenchon entre 2000 et 2002. Le PS de Hollande a plus tard fait campagne pour le traité de Lisbonne (repoussé par référendum en 2005 mais tout de même adopté en 2008 grâce à l’abstention ou au vote favorable de plus de 150 parlementaires PS). Avec sa décision de s’abstenir au parlement, le PS vient de sauver la dernière trouvaille merkozyste pour asphyxier la Grèce, dite « mécanisme européen de stabilité ».
Voici le bilan de l’UE pour l’impérialisme français. Grâce à la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, et à la destruction des acquis sociaux et au laminage des salaires qui l’y ont accompagnée, la bourgeoisie allemande notamment a pu délocaliser une part croissante des intrants de ses produits industriels vers ces pays qui constituent de plus en plus son hinterland (arrière-pays) économique ; la force de l’euro par rapport aux monnaies locales a encore abaissé le coût de ces produits pour les capitalistes allemands. La réduction des salaires en Allemagne même, notamment sous les gouvernements sociaux-démocrates présidés par Gerhard Schröder dans les années 2000, s’y est ajoutée pour donner un avantage compétitif croissant aux capitalistes allemands par rapport aux français. Les réformistes français, qui avaient soutenu la contre-révolution (au nom de l’avènement de la « démocratie ») et l’Union européenne sont maintenant fort déçus du résultat : c’est leur propre bourgeoisie qui coule.
En fait, aucun candidat du mouvement ouvrier dans ces élections ne s’oppose ni de près ni de loin à l’Union européenne. Mélenchon et le PCF voudraient que la Banque centrale européenne distribue de l’argent aux pauvres (le tout payé en fin de compte par les capitalistes allemands via une dépréciation de l’euro et/ou via des « eurobonds »), propageant ainsi l’illusion que l’UE et son institution monétaire pourraient se mettre au service des opprimés. Tant qu’ils y sont, pourquoi ne pas demander à Le Pen de défendre les immigrés ?
Mais le reste de la « gauche de la gauche » n’est pas en reste. Cela fait des années que le NPA, à la suite de son prédécesseur la Ligue « communiste révolutionnaire », se fait le chantre d’une Europe « démocratique et sociale », c’est-à-dire qu’il prétend qu’il pourrait y avoir une Europe capitaliste qui soit plus humaine que celle d’aujourd’hui. Le NPA détourne ainsi la classe ouvrière de la lutte pour renverser le système capitaliste tout entier et pour fonder sur cette base révolutionnaire internationaliste des Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe. Ces larbins de leur propre impérialisme tancent les travailleurs grecs et français qu’ils doivent rester prisonniers du carcan de l’euro, que le NPA présente comme un cadre protecteur face à leur propre bourgeoisie nationale. Ainsi l’éditorial de TOUT est à nous ! LA REVUE du NPA de janvier, signé Yvan Lemaitre, déclare à propos du retour aux monnaies nationales :
« Un tel retour en arrière enfermerait les travailleurs dans le carcan national à la merci de bourgeoisies nationales acharnées à défendre leur maigre place au sein de la nouvelle division internationale du travail. Il y a une autre issue, démocratique et progressiste, au sein de cette Europe devenue la nouvelle arène des luttes des travailleurs et des peuples. »
Comme Lemaitre est opposé à la révolution socialiste, il ne peut concevoir l’opposition à l’Union européenne capitaliste et à l’euro que d’un point de vue nationaliste de droite. Il a le cynisme de condamner « la propagande réactionnaire, chauvine et nationaliste qui prône le retour aux monnaies nationales et le repli derrière les frontières ». En fait c’est la faillite de la gauche, apôtre de l’Europe capitaliste « démocratique et sociale », qui gonfle les voiles de la démagogie des fascistes : elle leur laisse le monopole de l’opposition à l’Union européenne au nom de laquelle sont saccagés les acquis des travailleurs – et notamment des travailleurs allemands, qui ont été parmi les principales victimes des mesures de « compétitivité » en Europe. Les deux seuls candidats déclarés dans ces élections qui soient contre l’euro sont Marine Le Pen et Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, un vieux-gaulliste d’extrême droite.
(Le « Parti ouvrier indépendant » (POI) a sa propre ligne ultra-chauvine délirante franco-française ; lors du rassemblement du 13 février à Paris à propos de la Grèce, ses militants scandaient des slogans contre l’Union européenne, « agence américaine », et demandaient le départ de la troïka UE-FMI-BCE… de Paris, peut-être pour protéger la belle France des méfaits de celle-ci. Ils masquent ainsi le rôle de l’impérialisme français dans l’oppression de la Grèce.)
Le protectionnisme, une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes
Partout en Europe monte le nationalisme, expression idéologique de l’aiguisement des rivalités entre les bourgeoisies capitalistes sur le continent. Pour le combattre il faut rompre ouvertement avec la fiction réactionnaire d’une unification capitaliste de l’Europe et lutter au contraire pour l’internationalisme prolétarien révolutionnaire, et notamment aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères de classe grecs qui étouffent sous le joug de la BNP, de la Deutsche Bank et de la BCE. Il faut s’opposer aux campagnes protectionnistes pour taxer les produits d’importation, « produire français » ou « produire en France », qu’elles viennent de Sarkozy, de Hollande ou de Mélenchon (voir notamment notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre dernier, « PS, PCF, PG, NPA prônent l’alliance avec leur propre bourgeoisie contre les travailleurs d’autres pays – Le protectionnisme : une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes »). Il faut s’opposer au poison chauvin des rares idéologues « de gauche », comme Jacques Sapir (Faut-il sortir de l’euro ?) ou Jacques Nikonoff (Sortons de l’euro !), qui s’opposent à l’euro pour mieux préconiser le protectionnisme. Comme nous le disions à propos d’un article paru dans la revue Inprecor (juillet-août-septembre 2011) de Michel Husson, économiste fétiche du NPA (article où Husson défendait aussi l’euro) : « Le NPA veut faire croire qu’on peut réformer à bon compte le capitalisme, et en faisant la promotion d’un “bon” protectionnisme il donne de la légitimité au protectionnisme du Front national » (le Bolchévik n° 197, septembre 2011).
Et de même le PCF avec son « produisons français » qu’il vient de ressortir il y a quelques mois, et que reprend le FN. Aujourd’hui le FN demeure essentiellement une enveloppe parlementaire, mais sur le fond le fascisme, ce sont des nervis paramilitaires qui pratiquent la terreur raciste et dont la cible est au fond la classe ouvrière. Le système capitaliste décadent constitue le terreau dont se nourrissent les fascistes. En cas de crise aiguë la bourgeoisie les mobilise contre la classe ouvrière, comme en Allemagne en 1933. C’est pourquoi la lutte contre les fascistes est inséparable de la lutte pour la révolution socialiste. Pour les écraser il faut mobiliser la classe ouvrière en défense des musulmans, des immigrés, des homosexuels et de toutes les victimes désignées de cette racaille et lutter pour renverser le capitalisme – une perspective à laquelle les bureaucrates syndicaux sont hostiles, car ils cherchent à maintenir les syndicats enchaînés à l’ordre capitaliste.
Il faut combattre les licenciements qui menacent les travailleurs dans les usines que délocalisent les capitalistes à la recherche d’un profit maximal. Mais le protectionnisme signifie chercher un accord avec les capitalistes français pour maintenir la production ici contre les travailleurs des autres pays. C’est tout le contraire d’un programme internationaliste prolétarien, basé sur une lutte de classe commune par-delà les frontières contre ces mêmes capitalistes pour défendre et étendre les acquis des travailleurs. Pour lutter contre les manœuvres de la bourgeoisie pour diviser les travailleurs internationalement, il faut lutter pour des augmentations de salaires y compris dans les filiales et chez les sous-traitants dans d’autres pays. Il faut lutter pied à pied contre les licenciements en revendiquant le partage du travail entre toutes les mains, avec réduction du temps de travail correspondante sans perte de salaire. Il faut lutter pour l’embauche en CDI de tous les intérimaires et contrats précaires. A travail égal, salaire égal !
Cela exige de lutter pour des syndicats industriels regroupant dans une même organisation de lutte tous les travailleurs sur un site donné, y compris s’il s’agit de sous-traitants, d’entreprises françaises ou étrangères. Et cela en retour exige de lutter pour une nouvelle direction dans les syndicats, une direction révolutionnaire internationaliste remplaçant des bureaucrates qui se satisfont de la division des travailleurs syndiqués entre plusieurs syndicats concurrents, qui se satisfont même du faible nombre de syndiqués étant donné que c’est pour l’essentiel les patrons et l’Etat qui financent leur appareil.
La division de la classe ouvrière selon les frontières, avec le protectionnisme, va de pair avec la division des travailleurs à l’intérieur du pays selon des lignes ethniques, raciales ou sexuelles. Mélenchon, le plus clair avocat du protectionnisme parmi les candidats du mouvement ouvrier, n’a pratiquement rien à dire contre les campagnes racistes du gouvernement dans sa plaquette-programme de 96 pages. Il en va pourtant de l’unité du prolétariat multiethnique et multiracial de ce pays. Pleins droits de citoyenneté pour tous ceux qui sont ici ! A bas les expulsions de sans-papiers ! Le mouvement ouvrier doit défendre les jeunes de banlieue ! A bas la campagne raciste contre les femmes voilées !
LO se présente comme la vraie candidature PCF
Par rapport à ce marais, Nathalie Arthaud, la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, se présente comme la seule « candidature communiste ». Elle cherche à tirer profit des réticences initiales d’une partie significative des militants PCF à soutenir la candidature du jauressiste Mélenchon. (Jean Jaurès, qu’Engels traitait fort à propos de « phraseur », était à l’origine un radical bourgeois et sa politique n’évolua guère même quand il se déclara « socialiste ».) Mais le programme d’Arthaud n’a rien à voir avec le communisme. D’ailleurs l’UE, l’euro, LO a toujours été pour ; dans leur dernier document de conférence (Lutte de Classe n° 140, décembre 2011-janvier 2012) ils se lamentent que ces derniers temps « les quelques pas en avant faits par les bourgeoisies pour surmonter les rivalités nationales, comme dans le domaine de l’unification monétaire, sont aujourd’hui menacés ». Ils ont toujours célébré la soi-disant « ouverture des frontières » à l’intérieur de l’espace Schengen, alors qu’à tout moment il y a selon les estimations environ 100 000 personnes dans l’Union européenne qui sont en prison pour défaut de papiers, et 140 000 sont expulsées chaque année – et environ 15 000 personnes sont mortes en vingt ans en essayant de pénétrer cette forteresse raciste.
Voilà des gens qui se réclament soi-disant du « communisme », mais qui foulent aux pieds les principes les plus élémentaires de la lutte de classe en refusant de montrer à la classe ouvrière qu’on ne vote pas pour qui s’allie avec l’ennemi de classe bourgeois : LO a décidé lors de son récent congrès, en décembre dernier, de ne pas s’opposer à Hollande, en tout cas pas avant le soir du premier tour des élections. La candidature de LO n’est dès lors qu’une candidature pour faire pression sur le front populaire pour infléchir un peu à gauche sa politique une fois au pouvoir : « Même ceux qui, dans l’électorat populaire, par dégoût de Sarkozy, choisiront de voter pour Hollande au deuxième tour, ont intérêt à exprimer au premier tour qu’ils ne lui font pas confiance, qu’ils le garderont à l’œil et que, même avec la gauche au pouvoir, ils sauront imposer leurs exigences » (programme électoral de Nathalie Arthaud).
Quelle que puisse être la déclaration de Nathalie Arthaud le soir du premier tour à 20 heures, celle qu’avait faite dans les mêmes conditions Arlette Laguiller lors des élections de 2007 (appel à voter Ségolène Royal « sans réserve mais sans illusion ») laisse présager du pire. Même si LO s’avisait brusquement de préconiser l’abstention, leur participation continue depuis 2008 aux blocs municipaux de front populaire pour gérer le capitalisme localement, sous l’autorité de maires PCF ou chevènementistes, montre que LO ne s’oppose en rien à la collaboration de classes (y compris ils votent le budget). Aucun vote pour Nathalie Arthaud !
LO n’a jamais fait mystère du caractère réformiste de son municipalisme et de son syndicalisme. Ils écrivaient dans leur revue Lutte de Classe (février 2008) : « Par définition, l’activité municipale comme l’activité syndicale ne peuvent être révolutionnaires, mais sont réformistes. » Encore le mois dernier Jean-Pierre Mercier, porte-parole de Nathalie Arthaud et membre de la majorité municipale de Bagnolet, a signé une déclaration spéciale de solidarité politique avec le maire PCF, Marc Everbecq. Cette déclaration prenait la défense du « “vivre ensemble” et les solidarités », ainsi que de la « construction citoyenne », le soi-disant mode de gouvernement d’Everbecq. « Construction citoyenne » ou démolition raciste ? Les habitants d’un squat de travailleurs africains démoli à la tractopelle il y a deux ans par les services du maire apprécieront (voir notre article « Expulsions racistes à Bagnolet – LO se solidarise avec les expulsés… pour redorer le blason de la municipalité PCF », le Bolchévik n° 192, juin 2010). Voter le budget du maire, comme le fait Mercier depuis des années, cela veut dire justement lui payer sa tractopelle.
LO défend son réformisme municipal en argumentant que c’est là une longue tradition du mouvement ouvrier. Du mouvement ouvrier français, malheureusement oui, mais pas de Lénine. Celui-ci avait lutté avec acharnement en 1917 contre ses propres camarades qui voulaient précisément continuer les pratiques réformistes de la Deuxième Internationale au niveau de la gestion municipale (voir notre article dans Spartacist n° 39 sur les postes exécutifs). Ce n’est pas un hasard si la Constitution française exige depuis cinquante ans que le candidat au poste exécutif suprême soit parrainé par un certain nombre d’élus, dans leur immense majorité des maires qui justement exercent au quotidien un mandat exécutif.
Mercier est par ailleurs bureaucrate syndical à l’usine PSA d’Aulnay (voir notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre 2011). Face aux menaces de fermeture de cette usine, la CGT qu’il dirige vient d’organiser le 18 février une manifestation commune dans la ville avec le maire PS... et avec le SIA, le syndicat-maison de PSA (ex-CSL, des briseurs de grève de sinistre mémoire) ! En faisant ainsi l’unité avec les jaunes, LO pave la voie à la paralysie de la lutte et à la défaite face aux patrons. Le SIA a non sans raison cosigné une lettre de la CGT de décembre dernier à Sarkozy le suppliant de s’engager « par écrit » pour sauvegarder l’usine – après tout, ce ne serait pas sa première promesse de ce genre. Mercier lui-même croit-il qu’on peut défendre les emplois avec des bouts de papier de ce genre ?
On a malheureusement vu LO en action lors de la lutte en défense des retraites fin 2010. A l’époque ils se sont félicités de l’action des bureaucrates syndicaux, prétendant que cela « ne s’est pas fait au détriment des travailleurs » – pas étonnant, vu que leur propre rôle était d’« essayer d’être les meilleurs militants d’un mouvement déclenché et dirigé par les appareils bureaucratiques » (document adopté par la conférence de Lutte ouvrière, Lutte de Classe, décembre 2010-janvier 2011). En effet, ils sont maintenant eux-mêmes les bureaucrates syndicaux au niveau de nombreuses entreprises. Un an plus tard, ils ont subrepticement révisé leur bulletin de victoire en glissant dans un nouveau document de conférence que « le constat n’est évidemment pas le même un an après » (Lutte de Classe, décembre 2011-janvier 2012). Quant à réexaminer leur rôle dans cette défaite, LO en est loin ; mieux vaudra se référer à notre article « Leçons des grèves de l’automne en défense des retraites » (le Bolchévik n° 194, décembre 2010).
Au fond, le programme électoral de LO se résume à vouloir « imposer au grand patronat l’interdiction des licenciements », « imposer à l’Etat d’embaucher » et « imposer le contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires », le tout avec des augmentations de salaires et alignement automatique des salaires sur les prix. Tout cela, ils veulent l’« imposer aux possédants et aux gouvernants, quels qu’ils soient ». Le malheur, c’est qu’imposer aux capitalistes l’« interdiction » des licenciements, etc., ce serait leur imposer qu’ils cessent de faire fonctionner leur économie pour la production de profits, leur imposer de cesser d’être eux-mêmes.
LO pense que les exigences vitales des travailleurs peuvent « être imposées […] par une lutte collective des travailleurs, suffisamment massive, suffisamment explosive, pour menacer réellement la classe capitaliste. […] la classe capitaliste ne lâchera rien sans sentir la colère ouvrière et la menace sur ses profits et sur sa fortune. » Mais si une telle lutte explosive se produit, ce n’est pas là que les choses sérieuses se terminent, c’est là qu’elles commencent : ou bien on se satisfait d’avoir obtenu ces « exigences vitales » sous la menace, ou bien l’on va de l’avant pour renverser le capitalisme. LO se limite manifestement à la première perspective, promettant ainsi de réitérer les trahisons du PCF en Juin 36 ou en Mai 68, où le PCF avait fait retourner les ouvriers au travail après quelques concessions économiques de la bourgeoisie, trahissant ainsi la possibilité d’une révolution socialiste. Comme toujours dans ces cas-là, les concessions obtenues sont immédiatement minées par les capitalistes qui n’auront de cesse qu’elles ne soient vidées de tout contenu.
De même, le « contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires » ne peut être qu’une phase de la lutte des travailleurs pour imposer leurs propres organes de pouvoir, au niveau de l’usine et au niveau de l’ensemble de la société et pour liquider la propriété capitaliste pour de bon. Si l’on ne pose pas la perspective ainsi, d’un point de vue révolutionnaire, et LO ne le fait pas, il s’agit simplement de la cogestion où les bureaucrates syndicaux prennent part aux décisions des actionnaires pour mieux accroître le taux de profit des capitaux de ces derniers – et, en cette période de crise aiguë du capitalisme, « accompagner » les licenciements et les fermetures d’usines. Les mots suivants de Trotsky sont ici intégralement pertinents vis-à-vis de LO :
« La social-démocratie classique, qui développa son action à l’époque où le capitalisme était progressiste, divisait son programme en deux parties indépendantes l’une de l’autre : le PROGRAMME MINIMUM, qui se bornait à des réformes dans le cadre de la société bourgeoise, et le PROGRAMME MAXIMUM, qui promettait pour un avenir indéterminé le remplacement du capitalisme par le socialisme. Entre le programme minimum et le programme maximum, il n’y avait aucun pont. La social-démocratie n’en avait nul besoin, car de socialisme, elle ne parlait que les jours de fête. […]
« Dans la mesure où les vieilles revendications partielles “minimum” des masses se heurtent aux tendances destructives et dégradantes du capitalisme décadent – et cela se produit à chaque pas –, la IVe Internationale met en avant un système de REVENDICATIONS TRANSITOIRES dont le sens est de se diriger de plus en plus ouvertement et résolument contre les bases mêmes du régime bourgeois. Le vieux “programme minimum” est constamment dépassé par le PROGRAMME DE TRANSITION dont la tâche consiste en une mobilisation systématique des masses pour la révolution prolétarienne. »
– Programme de transition (1938)
La démoralisation frappe le mouvement ouvrier depuis vingt ans, avec la contre-révolution en Union soviétique et la campagne sur la soi-disant « mort du communisme ». Cette démoralisation ne rend la contradiction que plus criante entre les tâches objectives auxquelles fait face le prolétariat et le niveau de conscience de celui-ci, mais elle ne change rien au fait que la seule manière de résoudre cette contradiction, c’est de lutter pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire. Au cours de la lutte de classe, ce n’est pas spontanément que la classe ouvrière se dotera d’une conscience socialiste, comme veut le faire croire LO « les jours de fête », mais par l’intervention d’un parti léniniste.
Dans ces élections, il n’y a aucun choix pour les travailleurs. Il n’y a aucune candidature qui présente, même au premier tour, même d’une façon grossière, une ligne d’indépendance de classe contre Hollande et Sarkozy, les deux principaux candidats considérés par la bourgeoisie pour diriger l’impérialisme français dans la période à venir. Quel que soit l’élu, la classe ouvrière va faire face à un renforcement de l’offensive capitaliste contre ses acquis. Elle sera d’autant mieux préparée à y faire face qu’elle aura refusé d’écouter les sirènes du front populaire et de lui accorder ses suffrages. Surtout, elle a besoin d’une nouvelle direction, une direction révolutionnaire. Nous luttons pour construire le parti léniniste qui un jour la conduira à la victoire et au renversement du capitalisme. Pour reforger la Quatrième Internationale, parti mondial de la révolution socialiste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
Le Bolchévik nº 199
Mars 2012
Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire multiethnique !
21 février – Le président de la République française est le chef de l’exécutif, c’est-à-dire le dirigeant exécutif de l’Etat capitaliste, responsable en chef pour défendre les intérêts des capitalistes dans leur ensemble. Doté de pouvoirs exorbitants selon la Constitution issue du coup d’Etat gaulliste de 1958, le « chef de l’Etat » peut à volonté décréter la loi martiale, dissoudre le parlement, etc. Il est officiellement chef des armées, celles qui ont tué directement ou indirectement, rien que l’année dernière, peut-être des milliers de personnes en Côte d’Ivoire, en Libye, en Afghanistan et ailleurs. L’Etat est le comité exécutif de la classe dirigeante ; en son cœur il consiste en des bandes d’hommes armés (flics, armée, prisons, tribunaux) chargés de maintenir, grâce à leur monopole de la violence, le système de production basé sur l’esclavage salarié.
Comme le montre toute l’expérience chèrement acquise par le prolétariat international depuis les révolutions de 1848, la classe ouvrière, qui produit les richesses et surtout les profits qu’empochent les capitalistes, ne peut pas simplement mettre la main sur l’Etat capitaliste et l’utiliser pour son propre compte. Elle devra pour s’affranchir, et affranchir du même coup l’ensemble des opprimés, détruire l’Etat capitaliste et le remplacer par sa propre machine de répression des capitalistes récalcitrants : la dictature du prolétariat. Karl Marx avait tiré avec force cette leçon de la Commune de Paris, et Lénine l’avait confirmée avec la victoire de la Révolution russe d’octobre 1917. Nous luttons pour construire un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire du type de celui des bolchéviks de Lénine, indispensable à la victoire de la révolution.
Le prolétariat fait directement tourner les moyens de production : usines, mines, moyens de transport, etc. Aussi, lui seul a la puissance sociale, et l’intérêt objectif, pour prendre la tête de tous les opprimés et balayer le système capitaliste, ici et dans le monde entier. La révolution socialiste jettera les bases d’une économie planifiée rationnellement pour satisfaire les besoins et non pour fournir des profits. Un développement énorme des forces productives permettra d’avancer vers l’élimination de la pauvreté et de la pénurie et vers la création d’une société socialiste égalitaire.
Il découle de notre position révolutionnaire que nous marxistes refusons par principe d’occuper des postes exécutifs de l’Etat, car cela reviendrait à prendre la responsabilité pour mettre en œuvre l’appareil de répression capitaliste. Nous le refusons à tous les niveaux : depuis celui du président de la République en passant par les membres du gouvernement capitaliste, les préfets et jusqu’aux maires de villages, qui représentent l’Etat capitaliste au niveau des municipalités et disposent pour cela d’une série de pouvoirs, y compris des pouvoirs de police. Et il en découle aussi que nous refusons par principe de présenter des candidats à l’élection de tels postes. En effet, s’y présenter implique, qu’on le veuille ou non, que l’on est prêt à accepter de telles responsabilités, quels que soient les démentis que l’on puisse faire par avance. Cela ne peut que conférer une légitimité aux conceptions réformistes les plus répandues sur l’Etat, en donnant à penser que l’élection d’un « révolutionnaire » à la tête de l’Etat pourrait faire avancer les intérêts des travailleurs, voire nous faire l’économie d’une révolution (voir notre article « A bas les postes exécutifs de l’Etat capitaliste ! Principes marxistes et tactiques électorales », paru dans Spartacist édition française n° 39, été 2009).
Pour l’indépendance de classe du prolétariat ! A bas le front populaire !
Les marxistes peuvent toutefois envisager de donner un soutien critique à une autre organisation, même dans des élections présidentielles, du moment que cela peut faire avancer d’une manière ou d’une autre la conscience de classe du prolétariat. Mais dans les élections présentes, il n’y a personne à qui les marxistes puissent ne serait-ce qu’envisager de donner un soutien critique, car tous les candidats se réclamant peu ou prou du mouvement ouvrier sont dans le meilleur des cas une caution de gauche au candidat du PS et contribuent ainsi à alimenter des illusions dans le « changement » qu’il apporterait.
Tout ce que celui-ci, François Hollande, a promis, c’est de faire du sarkozysme « normal », sans bling-bling. En ouverture de sa campagne électorale, il s’est prononcé contre la tactique de l’« essuie-glace » (débat sur France 2, 26 janvier), c’est-à-dire qu’il n’effacera pas les attaques qu’a subies la classe ouvrière en dix ans de pouvoir de la droite. Hollande s’est engagé à priver de leurs droits à la retraite à taux plein tous ceux qui n’ont pas effectivement travaillé au moins 41 ans. Toute une partie de la bourgeoisie est excédée par Sarkozy – non pas tant par sa vulgarité tape-à-l’œil de nouveau riche que par le fait qu’il n’a pas rempli ses promesses de casser le mouvement ouvrier et spectaculairement gonfler le taux de profit des capitalistes. L’impérialisme français continuant de perdre du terrain par rapport à son rival allemand, il est impératif pour lui que son prochain commandant en chef mette en œuvre des attaques encore plus radicales contre la classe ouvrière et les opprimés. Hollande aurait l’avantage pour les capitalistes de bénéficier du soutien des bureaucrates syndicaux, qu’il a promis de « consulter » et de flatter en tant que « partenaires sociaux » pour diriger l’impérialisme français. Aucun vote pour François Hollande !
Hollande a aussi promis une lutte « implacable » contre les sans-papiers. Il a promis une « solution » pour les Roms en les mettant dans des « camps » pour « éviter que nous connaissions cette circulation encore et encore » (le Monde, 18 février). Une « solution finale » ? Il a promis d’embaucher plus de flics, attaquant de la droite Sarkozy sur un bilan « sécuritaire » insuffisant. Il a promis d’embaucher 60 000 personnes dans l’éducation – en les prenant sur d’autres postes dans la fonction publique et en pérennisant ainsi le tiers des 90 000 suppressions d’emplois pratiquées dans l’éducation par la droite ces dernières années.
S’il a promis de retirer les troupes françaises d’Afghanistan – que le gouvernement Jospin-Mélenchon avait envoyées il y a dix ans, avec Hollande comme chef du PS ! – c’est du point de vue des intérêts bien compris de l’impérialisme français : les pertes militaires subies ne justifient plus l’« avantage » de pouvoir entraîner les troupes à tuer de vraies personnes et de pouvoir négocier des contreparties avec les USA pour ses propres capitalistes. D’ailleurs Hollande a personnellement exprimé son soutien aux interventions militaires sanglantes de l’impérialisme français, organisées par Sarkozy, en Côte d’Ivoire et en Libye. Troupes françaises, hors d’Afghanistan, hors d’Afrique, hors du Liban, hors des Balkans, hors de la péninsule arabique !
François Hollande se présente de plus comme le candidat commun du PS et du Parti radical de gauche, un parti bourgeois. Ce genre de coalition est un « front populaire », un bloc entre partis ouvriers-bourgeois (des partis comme le PS ou le PCF ayant des liens avec le mouvement ouvrier et se réclamant d’une façon ou d’une autre de celui-ci, bien que leur direction et leur programme soient complètement bourgeois) et partis de la classe dominante, où ce sont inévitablement ces derniers qui donnent le caractère de classe de l’alliance, servant de garantie à la bourgeoisie que la coalition servira loyalement les capitalistes.
Les partis bourgeois servent aussi d’alibi aux réformistes pour leur propre programme bourgeois ; ainsi, le PCF prétendait encore en 1936 qu’il était pour des soviets (dans un avenir indéfini), mais concrètement il prônait un programme ultra modéré afin de préserver à tout prix l’alliance avec les « radicaux-socialistes » d’Edouard Herriot, le parti capitaliste par excellence de la Troisième République. Aujourd’hui le PS ne cache pas son programme bourgeois derrière les Radicaux, mais ceux-ci, ainsi que le parti bourgeois soi-disant « progressiste » des Verts avec qui le PS a déjà passé des accords électoraux pour les législatives, peuvent lui servir d’assurance en cas de soulèvement ouvrier, comme en Juin 36. Depuis cent ans, les partis ouvriers réformistes en France n’ont jamais gouverné sans faire un bloc de ce type avec des partis bourgeois.
En enchaînant les travailleurs à leur ennemi de classe, les alliances de front populaire pavent toujours la voie à la défaite, et c’est pourquoi c’est une question de principe pour les marxistes de s’y opposer. Le Front populaire de Juin 36 avait fini avec Pétain, celui d’Espagne la même année avec la dictature franquiste pendant près de quarante ans, celui du Chili avec le coup d’Etat de Pinochet en 1973. Dans le cycle ouvert par Mitterrand en 1981, le front populaire s’est chaque fois terminé par un retour en force de la réaction cinq ans plus tard, avec l’enracinement des fascistes du Front national.
Nous refusons également de donner le moindre soutien aux candidats de la « gauche de la gauche ». Les sociaux-démocrates du Parti communiste (PC) et du Parti de gauche (PG) se sont unis derrière Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ancien cadre de longue date du Parti socialiste qui avait occupé y compris un strapontin ministériel dans les dernières années du gouvernement Jospin, celui qui s’était vanté d’avoir effectué plus de privatisations que tous les gouvernements de droite précédents. Le PC et le PG se sont engagés avec force et inconditionnellement à « battre la droite » au deuxième tour, c’est-à-dire en clair à voter Hollande. Ils servent ainsi de simples rabatteurs de voix pour le front populaire.
C’est également le rôle du NPA d’Olivier Besancenot et Philippe Poutou ; d’ailleurs une bonne partie du NPA est en train de passer avec armes et bagages chez Mélenchon pour soutenir d’encore plus près le front populaire (et se rapprocher des sinécures que promet une victoire de la « gauche » aux élections). Quant à la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, Nathalie Arthaud, elle refuse pour le moment de s’opposer au vote Hollande – ces opportunistes avaient appelé au soir du premier tour des élections de 2007 à voter pour Ségolène Royal. Nous appelons les travailleurs à ne pas voter aux élections présidentielles, ni au premier ni au deuxième tour.
Ni, de même, aux législatives qui suivront. Lénine décrivait ainsi le parlementarisme :
« Décider périodiquement, pour un certain nombre d’années, quel membre de la classe dirigeante foulera aux pieds, écrasera le peuple au Parlement, telle est l’essence véritable du parlementarisme bourgeois, non seulement dans les monarchies constitutionnelles parlementaires, mais encore dans les républiques les plus démocratiques. »
– l’Etat et la révolution (1917)
Toutefois, à la différence des présidentielles, les marxistes peuvent envisager de se présenter aux législatives pour utiliser la campagne électorale et, s’ils sont élus, la tribune du parlement pour faire de la propagande en tant qu’oppositionnels, c’est-à-dire opposés à l’exécutif capitaliste quels qu’en soient les détenteurs. Il s’agit de faire de la propagande révolutionnaire, agissant comme des tribuns de la classe ouvrière et des opprimés.
A bas l’Union européenne capitaliste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
On peut voir très clairement sur l’Union européenne combien le programme du PS est chauvin et anti-ouvrier. L’Union européenne est une formation entièrement réactionnaire, un consortium d’Etats impérialistes et d’Etats plus faibles, dirigé par l’Allemagne. L’objectif initial de ses prédécesseurs, la Communauté européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier, l’Europe des Six, etc., était de renforcer la cohésion économique de l’Europe occidentale, essentiellement la France et l’Allemagne, pour garantir la solidité de l’OTAN, le bloc militaire capitaliste contre l’Union soviétique. Le PS de Mitterrand-Mélenchon n’a pas peu contribué dans les années 1980 à la victoire de la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, alors que nous, trotskystes, étions pour la défense militaire inconditionnelle de l’URSS. Pendant que la gauche en général, du PS à Lutte ouvrière, se réjouissait de la perspective d’une réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, nous avions lutté en 1989-1990 contre l’absorption de l’Etat ouvrier déformé est-allemand par l’Allemagne de l’Ouest capitaliste et pour une réunification révolutionnaire de l’Allemagne, au moyen d’une révolution politique prolétarienne contre la bureaucratie stalinienne parasitaire est-allemande, et d’une révolution socialiste à l’Ouest pour renverser et exproprier la bourgeoisie allemande.
L’URSS maintenant détruite, l’Union européenne (UE) est un simple bloc commercial entre des puissances impérialistes concurrentes, essentiellement l’Allemagne, la France et la Grande-Bretagne, qui se sont fait deux fois la guerre entre elles rien qu’au siècle dernier pour la suprématie en Europe et pour arracher à leurs rivales des parts de marché au niveau mondial. Le seul objet de l’UE est de soi-disant promouvoir la « concurrence libre et non faussée » (alors que le capitalisme a atteint depuis plus de cent ans l’ère des cartels et des monopoles). C’est une couverture idéologique pour des attaques croissantes contre les acquis que les travailleurs avaient pu arracher par leurs luttes à l’époque où l’Union soviétique existait encore. Ainsi, la directive antisyndicale Bolkestein visait à mettre davantage en concurrence les travailleurs des différents pays d’Europe les uns contre les autres ; comme nous l’écrivions dans un tract (reproduit dans le Bolchévik n° 175, mars 2006), « la directive Bolkestein va droit au cœur de ce qu’est l’Union européenne ». Plus récemment, nous soulignions dans le dernier Bolchévik (décembre 2011) :
« L’UE est une construction fragile, exposée aux tensions constamment engendrées par la divergence des intérêts nationaux des impérialistes européens ; ces tensions menacent constamment de la faire éclater. Il ne peut en être autrement. Les forces productives ont depuis longtemps débordé du cadre national, et pourtant le capitalisme est un système qui repose fondamentalement sur les Etats-nations : chacune des différentes classes capitalistes nationales a besoin d’avoir son propre Etat pour promouvoir et défendre ses intérêts à l’intérieur et à l’étranger. De ce fait, sous le capitalisme, une union politique, ou un super-Etat européen, est un objectif nécessairement réactionnaire en même temps qu’une utopie fumeuse. »
Aussi, la Ligue communiste internationale s’est toujours opposée à l’Union européenne et son instrument monétaire, l’euro. En mai 1997, alors que se finalisaient les négociations interimpérialistes pour la création de l’euro, nous écrivions dans un tract qui appelait à ne pas voter pour le front populaire Jospin-PCF : « Si demain, face aux luttes ouvrières, l’“union monétaire” était abandonnée ou repoussée aux calendes grecques, ce serait une victoire pour les travailleurs, qui dans toute l’Europe, opposent une résistance acharnée à l’offensive capitaliste. » Nous expliquions à l’époque qu’une monnaie unique n’est pas viable en l’absence d’un gouvernement européen unique, et celui-ci « ne peut être réalisé que par les méthodes d’Adolf Hitler, et non par celles de Jacques Delors, l’architecte social-démocrate français de Maastricht » – et père de Martine Aubry, aujourd’hui dirigeante du PS (voir le Bolchévik n° 143, été 1997).
Si Hollande s’oppose à Sarkozy sur la question de l’Europe, c’est uniquement du point de vue des intérêts de l’impérialisme français, pas ceux des travailleurs. Hollande reproche à Sarkozy de s’être couché devant les rivaux allemands de la France ; il est allé à Londres pour non seulement rassurer les financiers de la City qu’ils n’avaient rien à craindre de ses discours contre « le monde de la finance », mais aussi pour plaider pour un resserrement des liens franco-britanniques face à l’Allemagne. Hollande n’a par exemple nullement l’intention de revenir sur les conditions imposées par Merkel et Sarkozy à la Grèce, menant celle-ci à l’asphyxie et plongeant son peuple littéralement dans la misère – et jetant les bases pour aggraver les attaques contre les travailleurs dans le reste de l’Europe, y compris en Allemagne et en France.
En France, l’Union européenne et l’euro sont une affaire où les sociaux-démocrates ont toujours joué un rôle décisif. Pour essayer de garder des leviers sur l’Allemagne, Mitterrand avait négocié avec le chancelier Kohl en décembre 1989 une monnaie commune en échange de son accord pour la réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, qui allait inévitablement à terme renforcer la puissance de l’Allemagne par rapport à la France. Il avait fait voter par référendum en 1992 le traité de Maastricht instituant l’euro (le « oui » ne l’avait emporté que de justesse, grâce notamment au vote de Mélenchon et à l’abstention de Lutte ouvrière). L’euro lui-même a été introduit sous le gouvernement PS-PC-Verts de Jospin, auquel prit part Mélenchon entre 2000 et 2002. Le PS de Hollande a plus tard fait campagne pour le traité de Lisbonne (repoussé par référendum en 2005 mais tout de même adopté en 2008 grâce à l’abstention ou au vote favorable de plus de 150 parlementaires PS). Avec sa décision de s’abstenir au parlement, le PS vient de sauver la dernière trouvaille merkozyste pour asphyxier la Grèce, dite « mécanisme européen de stabilité ».
Voici le bilan de l’UE pour l’impérialisme français. Grâce à la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, et à la destruction des acquis sociaux et au laminage des salaires qui l’y ont accompagnée, la bourgeoisie allemande notamment a pu délocaliser une part croissante des intrants de ses produits industriels vers ces pays qui constituent de plus en plus son hinterland (arrière-pays) économique ; la force de l’euro par rapport aux monnaies locales a encore abaissé le coût de ces produits pour les capitalistes allemands. La réduction des salaires en Allemagne même, notamment sous les gouvernements sociaux-démocrates présidés par Gerhard Schröder dans les années 2000, s’y est ajoutée pour donner un avantage compétitif croissant aux capitalistes allemands par rapport aux français. Les réformistes français, qui avaient soutenu la contre-révolution (au nom de l’avènement de la « démocratie ») et l’Union européenne sont maintenant fort déçus du résultat : c’est leur propre bourgeoisie qui coule.
En fait, aucun candidat du mouvement ouvrier dans ces élections ne s’oppose ni de près ni de loin à l’Union européenne. Mélenchon et le PCF voudraient que la Banque centrale européenne distribue de l’argent aux pauvres (le tout payé en fin de compte par les capitalistes allemands via une dépréciation de l’euro et/ou via des « eurobonds »), propageant ainsi l’illusion que l’UE et son institution monétaire pourraient se mettre au service des opprimés. Tant qu’ils y sont, pourquoi ne pas demander à Le Pen de défendre les immigrés ?
Mais le reste de la « gauche de la gauche » n’est pas en reste. Cela fait des années que le NPA, à la suite de son prédécesseur la Ligue « communiste révolutionnaire », se fait le chantre d’une Europe « démocratique et sociale », c’est-à-dire qu’il prétend qu’il pourrait y avoir une Europe capitaliste qui soit plus humaine que celle d’aujourd’hui. Le NPA détourne ainsi la classe ouvrière de la lutte pour renverser le système capitaliste tout entier et pour fonder sur cette base révolutionnaire internationaliste des Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe. Ces larbins de leur propre impérialisme tancent les travailleurs grecs et français qu’ils doivent rester prisonniers du carcan de l’euro, que le NPA présente comme un cadre protecteur face à leur propre bourgeoisie nationale. Ainsi l’éditorial de TOUT est à nous ! LA REVUE du NPA de janvier, signé Yvan Lemaitre, déclare à propos du retour aux monnaies nationales :
« Un tel retour en arrière enfermerait les travailleurs dans le carcan national à la merci de bourgeoisies nationales acharnées à défendre leur maigre place au sein de la nouvelle division internationale du travail. Il y a une autre issue, démocratique et progressiste, au sein de cette Europe devenue la nouvelle arène des luttes des travailleurs et des peuples. »
Comme Lemaitre est opposé à la révolution socialiste, il ne peut concevoir l’opposition à l’Union européenne capitaliste et à l’euro que d’un point de vue nationaliste de droite. Il a le cynisme de condamner « la propagande réactionnaire, chauvine et nationaliste qui prône le retour aux monnaies nationales et le repli derrière les frontières ». En fait c’est la faillite de la gauche, apôtre de l’Europe capitaliste « démocratique et sociale », qui gonfle les voiles de la démagogie des fascistes : elle leur laisse le monopole de l’opposition à l’Union européenne au nom de laquelle sont saccagés les acquis des travailleurs – et notamment des travailleurs allemands, qui ont été parmi les principales victimes des mesures de « compétitivité » en Europe. Les deux seuls candidats déclarés dans ces élections qui soient contre l’euro sont Marine Le Pen et Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, un vieux-gaulliste d’extrême droite.
(Le « Parti ouvrier indépendant » (POI) a sa propre ligne ultra-chauvine délirante franco-française ; lors du rassemblement du 13 février à Paris à propos de la Grèce, ses militants scandaient des slogans contre l’Union européenne, « agence américaine », et demandaient le départ de la troïka UE-FMI-BCE… de Paris, peut-être pour protéger la belle France des méfaits de celle-ci. Ils masquent ainsi le rôle de l’impérialisme français dans l’oppression de la Grèce.)
Le protectionnisme, une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes
Partout en Europe monte le nationalisme, expression idéologique de l’aiguisement des rivalités entre les bourgeoisies capitalistes sur le continent. Pour le combattre il faut rompre ouvertement avec la fiction réactionnaire d’une unification capitaliste de l’Europe et lutter au contraire pour l’internationalisme prolétarien révolutionnaire, et notamment aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères de classe grecs qui étouffent sous le joug de la BNP, de la Deutsche Bank et de la BCE. Il faut s’opposer aux campagnes protectionnistes pour taxer les produits d’importation, « produire français » ou « produire en France », qu’elles viennent de Sarkozy, de Hollande ou de Mélenchon (voir notamment notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre dernier, « PS, PCF, PG, NPA prônent l’alliance avec leur propre bourgeoisie contre les travailleurs d’autres pays – Le protectionnisme : une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes »). Il faut s’opposer au poison chauvin des rares idéologues « de gauche », comme Jacques Sapir (Faut-il sortir de l’euro ?) ou Jacques Nikonoff (Sortons de l’euro !), qui s’opposent à l’euro pour mieux préconiser le protectionnisme. Comme nous le disions à propos d’un article paru dans la revue Inprecor (juillet-août-septembre 2011) de Michel Husson, économiste fétiche du NPA (article où Husson défendait aussi l’euro) : « Le NPA veut faire croire qu’on peut réformer à bon compte le capitalisme, et en faisant la promotion d’un “bon” protectionnisme il donne de la légitimité au protectionnisme du Front national » (le Bolchévik n° 197, septembre 2011).
Et de même le PCF avec son « produisons français » qu’il vient de ressortir il y a quelques mois, et que reprend le FN. Aujourd’hui le FN demeure essentiellement une enveloppe parlementaire, mais sur le fond le fascisme, ce sont des nervis paramilitaires qui pratiquent la terreur raciste et dont la cible est au fond la classe ouvrière. Le système capitaliste décadent constitue le terreau dont se nourrissent les fascistes. En cas de crise aiguë la bourgeoisie les mobilise contre la classe ouvrière, comme en Allemagne en 1933. C’est pourquoi la lutte contre les fascistes est inséparable de la lutte pour la révolution socialiste. Pour les écraser il faut mobiliser la classe ouvrière en défense des musulmans, des immigrés, des homosexuels et de toutes les victimes désignées de cette racaille et lutter pour renverser le capitalisme – une perspective à laquelle les bureaucrates syndicaux sont hostiles, car ils cherchent à maintenir les syndicats enchaînés à l’ordre capitaliste.
Il faut combattre les licenciements qui menacent les travailleurs dans les usines que délocalisent les capitalistes à la recherche d’un profit maximal. Mais le protectionnisme signifie chercher un accord avec les capitalistes français pour maintenir la production ici contre les travailleurs des autres pays. C’est tout le contraire d’un programme internationaliste prolétarien, basé sur une lutte de classe commune par-delà les frontières contre ces mêmes capitalistes pour défendre et étendre les acquis des travailleurs. Pour lutter contre les manœuvres de la bourgeoisie pour diviser les travailleurs internationalement, il faut lutter pour des augmentations de salaires y compris dans les filiales et chez les sous-traitants dans d’autres pays. Il faut lutter pied à pied contre les licenciements en revendiquant le partage du travail entre toutes les mains, avec réduction du temps de travail correspondante sans perte de salaire. Il faut lutter pour l’embauche en CDI de tous les intérimaires et contrats précaires. A travail égal, salaire égal !
Cela exige de lutter pour des syndicats industriels regroupant dans une même organisation de lutte tous les travailleurs sur un site donné, y compris s’il s’agit de sous-traitants, d’entreprises françaises ou étrangères. Et cela en retour exige de lutter pour une nouvelle direction dans les syndicats, une direction révolutionnaire internationaliste remplaçant des bureaucrates qui se satisfont de la division des travailleurs syndiqués entre plusieurs syndicats concurrents, qui se satisfont même du faible nombre de syndiqués étant donné que c’est pour l’essentiel les patrons et l’Etat qui financent leur appareil.
La division de la classe ouvrière selon les frontières, avec le protectionnisme, va de pair avec la division des travailleurs à l’intérieur du pays selon des lignes ethniques, raciales ou sexuelles. Mélenchon, le plus clair avocat du protectionnisme parmi les candidats du mouvement ouvrier, n’a pratiquement rien à dire contre les campagnes racistes du gouvernement dans sa plaquette-programme de 96 pages. Il en va pourtant de l’unité du prolétariat multiethnique et multiracial de ce pays. Pleins droits de citoyenneté pour tous ceux qui sont ici ! A bas les expulsions de sans-papiers ! Le mouvement ouvrier doit défendre les jeunes de banlieue ! A bas la campagne raciste contre les femmes voilées !
LO se présente comme la vraie candidature PCF
Par rapport à ce marais, Nathalie Arthaud, la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, se présente comme la seule « candidature communiste ». Elle cherche à tirer profit des réticences initiales d’une partie significative des militants PCF à soutenir la candidature du jauressiste Mélenchon. (Jean Jaurès, qu’Engels traitait fort à propos de « phraseur », était à l’origine un radical bourgeois et sa politique n’évolua guère même quand il se déclara « socialiste ».) Mais le programme d’Arthaud n’a rien à voir avec le communisme. D’ailleurs l’UE, l’euro, LO a toujours été pour ; dans leur dernier document de conférence (Lutte de Classe n° 140, décembre 2011-janvier 2012) ils se lamentent que ces derniers temps « les quelques pas en avant faits par les bourgeoisies pour surmonter les rivalités nationales, comme dans le domaine de l’unification monétaire, sont aujourd’hui menacés ». Ils ont toujours célébré la soi-disant « ouverture des frontières » à l’intérieur de l’espace Schengen, alors qu’à tout moment il y a selon les estimations environ 100 000 personnes dans l’Union européenne qui sont en prison pour défaut de papiers, et 140 000 sont expulsées chaque année – et environ 15 000 personnes sont mortes en vingt ans en essayant de pénétrer cette forteresse raciste.
Voilà des gens qui se réclament soi-disant du « communisme », mais qui foulent aux pieds les principes les plus élémentaires de la lutte de classe en refusant de montrer à la classe ouvrière qu’on ne vote pas pour qui s’allie avec l’ennemi de classe bourgeois : LO a décidé lors de son récent congrès, en décembre dernier, de ne pas s’opposer à Hollande, en tout cas pas avant le soir du premier tour des élections. La candidature de LO n’est dès lors qu’une candidature pour faire pression sur le front populaire pour infléchir un peu à gauche sa politique une fois au pouvoir : « Même ceux qui, dans l’électorat populaire, par dégoût de Sarkozy, choisiront de voter pour Hollande au deuxième tour, ont intérêt à exprimer au premier tour qu’ils ne lui font pas confiance, qu’ils le garderont à l’œil et que, même avec la gauche au pouvoir, ils sauront imposer leurs exigences » (programme électoral de Nathalie Arthaud).
Quelle que puisse être la déclaration de Nathalie Arthaud le soir du premier tour à 20 heures, celle qu’avait faite dans les mêmes conditions Arlette Laguiller lors des élections de 2007 (appel à voter Ségolène Royal « sans réserve mais sans illusion ») laisse présager du pire. Même si LO s’avisait brusquement de préconiser l’abstention, leur participation continue depuis 2008 aux blocs municipaux de front populaire pour gérer le capitalisme localement, sous l’autorité de maires PCF ou chevènementistes, montre que LO ne s’oppose en rien à la collaboration de classes (y compris ils votent le budget). Aucun vote pour Nathalie Arthaud !
LO n’a jamais fait mystère du caractère réformiste de son municipalisme et de son syndicalisme. Ils écrivaient dans leur revue Lutte de Classe (février 2008) : « Par définition, l’activité municipale comme l’activité syndicale ne peuvent être révolutionnaires, mais sont réformistes. » Encore le mois dernier Jean-Pierre Mercier, porte-parole de Nathalie Arthaud et membre de la majorité municipale de Bagnolet, a signé une déclaration spéciale de solidarité politique avec le maire PCF, Marc Everbecq. Cette déclaration prenait la défense du « “vivre ensemble” et les solidarités », ainsi que de la « construction citoyenne », le soi-disant mode de gouvernement d’Everbecq. « Construction citoyenne » ou démolition raciste ? Les habitants d’un squat de travailleurs africains démoli à la tractopelle il y a deux ans par les services du maire apprécieront (voir notre article « Expulsions racistes à Bagnolet – LO se solidarise avec les expulsés… pour redorer le blason de la municipalité PCF », le Bolchévik n° 192, juin 2010). Voter le budget du maire, comme le fait Mercier depuis des années, cela veut dire justement lui payer sa tractopelle.
LO défend son réformisme municipal en argumentant que c’est là une longue tradition du mouvement ouvrier. Du mouvement ouvrier français, malheureusement oui, mais pas de Lénine. Celui-ci avait lutté avec acharnement en 1917 contre ses propres camarades qui voulaient précisément continuer les pratiques réformistes de la Deuxième Internationale au niveau de la gestion municipale (voir notre article dans Spartacist n° 39 sur les postes exécutifs). Ce n’est pas un hasard si la Constitution française exige depuis cinquante ans que le candidat au poste exécutif suprême soit parrainé par un certain nombre d’élus, dans leur immense majorité des maires qui justement exercent au quotidien un mandat exécutif.
Mercier est par ailleurs bureaucrate syndical à l’usine PSA d’Aulnay (voir notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre 2011). Face aux menaces de fermeture de cette usine, la CGT qu’il dirige vient d’organiser le 18 février une manifestation commune dans la ville avec le maire PS... et avec le SIA, le syndicat-maison de PSA (ex-CSL, des briseurs de grève de sinistre mémoire) ! En faisant ainsi l’unité avec les jaunes, LO pave la voie à la paralysie de la lutte et à la défaite face aux patrons. Le SIA a non sans raison cosigné une lettre de la CGT de décembre dernier à Sarkozy le suppliant de s’engager « par écrit » pour sauvegarder l’usine – après tout, ce ne serait pas sa première promesse de ce genre. Mercier lui-même croit-il qu’on peut défendre les emplois avec des bouts de papier de ce genre ?
On a malheureusement vu LO en action lors de la lutte en défense des retraites fin 2010. A l’époque ils se sont félicités de l’action des bureaucrates syndicaux, prétendant que cela « ne s’est pas fait au détriment des travailleurs » – pas étonnant, vu que leur propre rôle était d’« essayer d’être les meilleurs militants d’un mouvement déclenché et dirigé par les appareils bureaucratiques » (document adopté par la conférence de Lutte ouvrière, Lutte de Classe, décembre 2010-janvier 2011). En effet, ils sont maintenant eux-mêmes les bureaucrates syndicaux au niveau de nombreuses entreprises. Un an plus tard, ils ont subrepticement révisé leur bulletin de victoire en glissant dans un nouveau document de conférence que « le constat n’est évidemment pas le même un an après » (Lutte de Classe, décembre 2011-janvier 2012). Quant à réexaminer leur rôle dans cette défaite, LO en est loin ; mieux vaudra se référer à notre article « Leçons des grèves de l’automne en défense des retraites » (le Bolchévik n° 194, décembre 2010).
Au fond, le programme électoral de LO se résume à vouloir « imposer au grand patronat l’interdiction des licenciements », « imposer à l’Etat d’embaucher » et « imposer le contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires », le tout avec des augmentations de salaires et alignement automatique des salaires sur les prix. Tout cela, ils veulent l’« imposer aux possédants et aux gouvernants, quels qu’ils soient ». Le malheur, c’est qu’imposer aux capitalistes l’« interdiction » des licenciements, etc., ce serait leur imposer qu’ils cessent de faire fonctionner leur économie pour la production de profits, leur imposer de cesser d’être eux-mêmes.
LO pense que les exigences vitales des travailleurs peuvent « être imposées […] par une lutte collective des travailleurs, suffisamment massive, suffisamment explosive, pour menacer réellement la classe capitaliste. […] la classe capitaliste ne lâchera rien sans sentir la colère ouvrière et la menace sur ses profits et sur sa fortune. » Mais si une telle lutte explosive se produit, ce n’est pas là que les choses sérieuses se terminent, c’est là qu’elles commencent : ou bien on se satisfait d’avoir obtenu ces « exigences vitales » sous la menace, ou bien l’on va de l’avant pour renverser le capitalisme. LO se limite manifestement à la première perspective, promettant ainsi de réitérer les trahisons du PCF en Juin 36 ou en Mai 68, où le PCF avait fait retourner les ouvriers au travail après quelques concessions économiques de la bourgeoisie, trahissant ainsi la possibilité d’une révolution socialiste. Comme toujours dans ces cas-là, les concessions obtenues sont immédiatement minées par les capitalistes qui n’auront de cesse qu’elles ne soient vidées de tout contenu.
De même, le « contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires » ne peut être qu’une phase de la lutte des travailleurs pour imposer leurs propres organes de pouvoir, au niveau de l’usine et au niveau de l’ensemble de la société et pour liquider la propriété capitaliste pour de bon. Si l’on ne pose pas la perspective ainsi, d’un point de vue révolutionnaire, et LO ne le fait pas, il s’agit simplement de la cogestion où les bureaucrates syndicaux prennent part aux décisions des actionnaires pour mieux accroître le taux de profit des capitaux de ces derniers – et, en cette période de crise aiguë du capitalisme, « accompagner » les licenciements et les fermetures d’usines. Les mots suivants de Trotsky sont ici intégralement pertinents vis-à-vis de LO :
« La social-démocratie classique, qui développa son action à l’époque où le capitalisme était progressiste, divisait son programme en deux parties indépendantes l’une de l’autre : le PROGRAMME MINIMUM, qui se bornait à des réformes dans le cadre de la société bourgeoise, et le PROGRAMME MAXIMUM, qui promettait pour un avenir indéterminé le remplacement du capitalisme par le socialisme. Entre le programme minimum et le programme maximum, il n’y avait aucun pont. La social-démocratie n’en avait nul besoin, car de socialisme, elle ne parlait que les jours de fête. […]
« Dans la mesure où les vieilles revendications partielles “minimum” des masses se heurtent aux tendances destructives et dégradantes du capitalisme décadent – et cela se produit à chaque pas –, la IVe Internationale met en avant un système de REVENDICATIONS TRANSITOIRES dont le sens est de se diriger de plus en plus ouvertement et résolument contre les bases mêmes du régime bourgeois. Le vieux “programme minimum” est constamment dépassé par le PROGRAMME DE TRANSITION dont la tâche consiste en une mobilisation systématique des masses pour la révolution prolétarienne. »
– Programme de transition (1938)
La démoralisation frappe le mouvement ouvrier depuis vingt ans, avec la contre-révolution en Union soviétique et la campagne sur la soi-disant « mort du communisme ». Cette démoralisation ne rend la contradiction que plus criante entre les tâches objectives auxquelles fait face le prolétariat et le niveau de conscience de celui-ci, mais elle ne change rien au fait que la seule manière de résoudre cette contradiction, c’est de lutter pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire. Au cours de la lutte de classe, ce n’est pas spontanément que la classe ouvrière se dotera d’une conscience socialiste, comme veut le faire croire LO « les jours de fête », mais par l’intervention d’un parti léniniste.
Dans ces élections, il n’y a aucun choix pour les travailleurs. Il n’y a aucune candidature qui présente, même au premier tour, même d’une façon grossière, une ligne d’indépendance de classe contre Hollande et Sarkozy, les deux principaux candidats considérés par la bourgeoisie pour diriger l’impérialisme français dans la période à venir. Quel que soit l’élu, la classe ouvrière va faire face à un renforcement de l’offensive capitaliste contre ses acquis. Elle sera d’autant mieux préparée à y faire face qu’elle aura refusé d’écouter les sirènes du front populaire et de lui accorder ses suffrages. Surtout, elle a besoin d’une nouvelle direction, une direction révolutionnaire. Nous luttons pour construire le parti léniniste qui un jour la conduira à la victoire et au renversement du capitalisme. Pour reforger la Quatrième Internationale, parti mondial de la révolution socialiste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-French Elections: No Choice for Workers
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012
For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!
French Elections: No Choice for Workers
MARCH 25—Three days ago, a special police unit killed Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who, police say, had killed three paratroopers of black and North African origin and four Jewish civilians—three children and a rabbi—near Toulouse in Southern France over the previous eleven days. Reportedly, Merah had been in Afghanistan and claimed to be appalled by the crimes of the French military, which led him to target soldiers. Police say that on the morning of March 19, Merah arrived too late to kill another soldier he had picked out and instead decided to go on a killing spree in front of a Jewish school, an abominable anti-Semitic crime.
This has become a central issue in the campaign leading up to the presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 22. In the likely event that no one gets an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on May 6 between the two top-polling candidates. Ramping up his anti-immigrant “security” pitch, President Nicolas Sarkozy seized on the case to immediately announce new measures targeting primarily Salafist Muslims in France, threatening to jail people who “regularly” consult Web sites declared haram (illicit) by the French government. Sarkozy plans to introduce new legislation that would outlaw “propagating and advocating extremist ideologies.” This is an open threat to criminalize the dissemination of all “forbidden” opinions—a weapon historically wielded by capitalist governments against the left and the workers movement.
The “war on terror” is currently being used primarily against Muslims, but all opponents of the racist capitalist system, and ultimately the multiracial working class, are targeted. In this heightened atmosphere of racist witchhunt, dark-skinned youth in the heavily immigrant ghettos of the suburbs (banlieues) who are suspected of having Muslim backgrounds will be targeted more than ever for daily state repression. Down with the racist “war on terror”! The workers movement must defend banlieue youth!
The Toulouse killings have been an opportunity for the various candidates, including those on the left, to stand by the President in a despicable show of “national unity.” Green candidate (and former judge) Eva Joly, along with Socialist Party (SP) hopeful François Hollande, joined the fascist Marine Le Pen at the memorial service for the paratroopers, where Sarkozy himself delivered the eulogy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the Left Front (mainly composed of the Communist Party and a split from Hollande’s SP), rushed to “congratulate” the cops for the extra-judicial killing of Merah. Mélenchon seized the opportunity to promote his program for hiring more National Police, which he terms a “public service.” The candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nathalie Arthaud, claimed to not partake of the “national unity” hype. However, its initial statement on the anti-Semitic crimes in Toulouse and the killing of the French elite forces stationed in nearby Montauban, a March 20 declaration by Arthaud, was published in Lutte Ouvrière (23 March) with the headline: “The Killings in Montauban and Toulouse: Odious Acts.”
For Marxists there is a distinction between the slaying of Jewish children and a teacher on the one hand and the killing of soldiers from the elite paratrooper units, which have a long history of murderous terror on behalf of French imperialism from Algeria to Afghanistan and Indochina, on the other. The second is not a crime from the standpoint of the working class. But such individual terrorist acts are an obstacle to mobilizing the collective struggle of a politically conscious working class against the capitalist system. One thing is certain: the killings will bring fierce repression down on the heads of minorities and others in the state’s crosshairs. Down with the Vigipirate campaign of racist cop terror! U.S./French/NATO troops out of Afghanistan!
The following excerpted article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The LTF explained in its article that “the President of the Republic is the chief executive, that is to say, the executive director of the capitalist state, chief advocate for the interests of the capitalists as a whole.” As the comrades wrote, as Marxist revolutionaries, we refuse in principle to hold executive positions in the capitalist state—president, governor or mayor. From the same standpoint, we refuse to run for such offices, since doing so would only give legitimacy to the reformist notion that a “revolutionary” at the head of the state could advance the interests of the working class.
* * *
Marxists may consider giving critical support to another organization, even in presidential elections, when doing so can in some way raise the class consciousness of the proletariat. But in this election, there is no one to whom Marxists can even contemplate giving critical support because all the candidates who in any way claim to represent the labor movement are at best a left cover for the SP candidacy, thereby helping to sow illusions in the “change” that it would supposedly bring.
The SP candidate, François Hollande, simply promises to pursue the same policies as Nicolas Sarkozy, but without the “bling-bling” (hobnobbing with the rich and famous). Hollande launched his campaign, in the January 26 televised debate, by declaring his opposition to a “windshield wipers” policy—in other words, Hollande will not sweep away the anti-working-class measures that have been enacted during the ten years of right-wing rule. Hollande promises to deprive of a full pension all those who have not actually worked for at least 41 years.
An entire section of the bourgeoisie is irritated by Sarkozy—not so much because of his nouveau riche vulgarity but because he has not fulfilled his promise to break the labor movement and dramatically increase the capitalists’ rate of profit. Since French imperialism continues to lose ground against its German rival, it is imperative that its next Commander-in-Chief carry out even more radical attacks against the working class and the oppressed. For the capitalists, Hollande would have the advantage of receiving the support of the union bureaucrats, whom he promised to “consult” and soft-soap as “social partners” in leading French imperialism. No vote for François Hollande!
Hollande has also promised a “relentless” fight against undocumented immigrants. The “solution” he promised for the Roma (Gypsies) is putting them in “camps” to “avoid this constant moving around” (Le Monde, 18 February). Meanwhile, he promised to hire more cops, criticizing Sarkozy from the right for insufficient results in maintaining “law and order.” He promised to hire 60,000 teachers—thereby perpetuating a third of the 90,000 job cuts made in education by the right-wing government in recent years—by eliminating jobs in other areas of the public sector.
While Hollande has promised to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan—troops that were initially sent by the Socialist government of [Lionel] Jospin and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon ten years ago, when Hollande himself was the head of the SP—this is from the standpoint of serving the best interests of French imperialism. The current military losses are no longer justified by the “advantage” of being able to train troops to kill real people and enabling France to negotiate with the United States to obtain certain advantages for its own capitalists. Besides, Hollande has personally declared his support for the bloody military interventions of French imperialism organized by Sarkozy in the Ivory Coast and Libya. French troops out of Afghanistan, Africa, Lebanon, the Balkans and the Arabian Peninsula!
Moreover, François Hollande is running as the joint candidate of the SP and the Left Radical Party, a bourgeois party. This kind of coalition is a “popular front,” a bloc between bourgeois parties and bourgeois workers parties—that is, parties like the SP or the Communist Party (PCF), which have ties to the labor movement and claim, in one way or another, to be part of it, even though their leadership and program are totally bourgeois. In such coalitions, it is the bourgeois parties that inevitably determine the class character of the alliance, guaranteeing that it will loyally serve the capitalists.
By tying the workers to their class enemy, popular-front alliances have always paved the way for defeat. That is why it is a matter of principle for Marxists to oppose them. The June 1936 Popular Front led to [the Nazi collaborator] Pétain; the 1936 Popular Front in Spain led to the Franco dictatorship which ruled for nearly 40 years; in Chile it led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Beginning with [Socialist Party leader François] Mitterrand in 1981, a succession of popular fronts has each time been followed five years later by a return to power of right-wing reactionaries. Meanwhile, the fascists of the National Front have taken root.
We also refuse to give any support to the candidates of the “left of the left.” The social democrats of the PCF and the Left Party (PG) have united behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon, formerly a longtime Socialist Party leader who had held a minor ministerial post during the last years of the Jospin government. The latter boasted of having performed more privatizations than all of the previous right-wing governments. The PCF and PG are unconditionally determined to “defeat the right” on the second round, which decoded means “vote for Hollande.” They are thus acting simply as vote-getters for the popular front.
This is also the role of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] of Olivier Besancenot and Philippe Poutou. In fact, much of the NPA has been going over to Mélenchon’s party in order to support the popular front more directly (and have a better chance at getting sinecures if the “left” wins the elections). As for Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, she refuses, for the time being, to oppose voting for Hollande. In the 2007 presidential elections, these opportunists called for a vote for [SP candidate] Ségolène Royal on the second round. We call on workers not to vote in the presidential elections, neither on the first nor the second round.
Workers should also not vote in the coming parliamentary elections. This is how Lenin described parliamentarism:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
— The State and Revolution (1917)
However, in parliamentary elections, unlike presidential elections, Marxists may consider running candidates and using the election campaign and, if elected, the parliamentary podium as oppositionists, that is, in opposition to the capitalist executive power, no matter who is running the state. The purpose is to disseminate revolutionary propaganda and act as a tribune of the workers and the oppressed.
Down With the European Union!
The chauvinist and anti-working-class program of the SP appears particularly clearly in regard to the European Union (EU). The EU is an entirely reactionary institution—a consortium of imperialist states and weaker states—led by Germany. The initial purpose of the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Europe of Six, etc., was to strengthen the economic cohesion of capitalist West Europe—mainly France and Germany—in order to consolidate the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, the SP of Mitterrand and Mélenchon contributed in no small measure to the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe. We Trotskyists were for the unconditional military defense of the USSR. In 1989-1990, the left in general, from the SP to Lutte Ouvrière, rejoiced at the prospect of a capitalist reunification of Germany. In contrast, we fought against the absorption of the East German deformed workers state by capitalist West Germany and for revolutionary reunification, through a proletarian political revolution against the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy in East Germany and a socialist revolution in the West to overthrow and expropriate the German bourgeoisie.
With the USSR now destroyed, the EU is merely a trading bloc of competing imperialist powers, mainly Germany, France and Britain, which went to war with each other twice in the last century alone to achieve supremacy in Europe and to seize their rivals’ global market share. Supposedly, the only purpose of the EU is to promote “free and fair competition” (even though capitalism over a century ago entered the era of cartels and monopolies). This is an ideological cover for increasing attacks against the gains that workers were able to wrest through their struggles when the Soviet Union still existed. Thus, the anti-union Bolkestein Directive aims at pitting the workers of the various European countries against each other. As we wrote in a leaflet (reprinted in Le Bolchévik, March 2006), “The Bolkestein Directive gets to the heart of what the European Union is.” More recently, we stressed in the most recent Le Bolchévik (December 2011):
“The EU is a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which are constantly threatening to tear it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since outgrown a national framework, capitalism is a system that rests essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. Hence under capitalism, the goal of political union or a European superstate is necessarily reactionary and an empty utopia.”
— see “Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011
The International Communist League has always opposed the EU and its monetary instrument, the euro. In May 1997, as the imperialists’ negotiations for the creation of the euro were being finalized, we wrote a leaflet calling for not voting for the PCF/Jospin popular front, which declared: “If in the future, because of workers’ struggles, the ‘monetary union’ is abandoned or postponed indefinitely, this would be a victory for workers, who throughout Europe have militantly resisted the capitalist offensive.” We explained at the time that a single currency was not viable in the absence of a single European government, and that such a government “can only be achieved by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not by those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht [treaty establishing the euro]” (see “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” WV No. 670, 13 June 1997).
Hollande’s opposition to Sarkozy on the question of Europe is solely from the standpoint of the interests of French imperialism, not those of the working class. Hollande accuses Sarkozy of capitulating to France’s German rivals. He went to London not only to reassure the financiers of the City that they had nothing to fear from his speech against “the world of finance,” but also to advocate closer ties between France and Britain against Germany. Hollande has, for example, no intention of changing the conditions imposed by [German chancellor Angela] Merkel and Sarkozy on Greece, which are strangling that country and literally driving its people into extreme poverty. Those measures are also laying the groundwork for intensifying attacks on workers in the rest of Europe, including Germany and France.
In France, the social democrats have always played a decisive role regarding the EU and the euro. In December 1989, seeking to maintain some leverage over Germany, Mitterrand negotiated a common currency with Chancellor Kohl in exchange for agreeing to the capitalist reunification of Germany, which inevitably would lead to strengthening the power of Germany relative to France. He had the Maastricht Treaty approved by referendum in 1992. (It was approved only by a narrow margin, thanks in part to Mélenchon’s vote in favor and LO’s abstention.) The euro itself was introduced under Jospin’s SP-PCF-Green government, which Mélenchon was part of from 2000 to 2002. Hollande’s SP later campaigned for the Lisbon Treaty [approving a new EU constitution]. (The treaty was rejected by referendum in 2005, but nevertheless adopted in 2008 thanks to the abstention or “yes” vote of over 150 SP members of parliament.) Recently, by deciding to abstain in parliament, the SP saved the latest scheme by “Merkozy” to asphyxiate Greece, called the “European Stability Mechanism.”
That is the EU’s balance sheet for French imperialism. Thanks to the capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe, and the concomitant wage cuts and loss of workers’ gains, the German bourgeoisie was able to outsource a growing share of the inputs of its industrial products to those countries, which are increasingly its economic hinterland. The strength of the euro against the local currencies has further lowered the cost of these products for German capitalists. In addition, wage cuts in Germany itself, particularly under the social-democratic governments headed by Gerhard Schröder in the 2000s, gave German capitalists an increased competitive advantage over the French. The French reformists, who supported the counterrevolution (in the name of “democracy”) and the European Union, are now very disappointed with the outcome: Their own bourgeoisie is the loser.
In fact, no candidate of the workers movement in these elections stands in any way opposed to the EU. Mélenchon and the PCF want the European Central Bank to give money to the poor (to be paid for ultimately by the German capitalists through depreciation of the euro and/or through “euro bonds”). Thus, they spread illusions that the EU and its monetary instrument could be placed at the service of the oppressed. While they’re at it, why not call on the fascist Le Pen to defend immigrants?
But the rest of the “left of the left” are no better. For years the NPA, following its predecessor, the misnamed Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has called for a “democratic and social” Europe. In other words, they pretend that there can be a capitalist Europe that is more humane than the existing one. The NPA thus deflects the working class away from struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system and to establish a Socialist United States of Europe on a revolutionary internationalist basis. These lackeys of their own imperialism admonish the workers in Greece and France that they should remain prisoners of the euro straitjacket, which the NPA presents as protection against one’s own national bourgeoisie. Thus the editorial by Yvan Lemaitre in the January issue of the NPA’s monthly, Tout Est à Nous! La Revue [Everything Is Ours! The Magazine], proclaims, regarding a return to national currencies:
“Such a step backward would lock the workers into the national straitjacket at the mercy of their own implacable national bourgeoisies, each one bitterly defending its own position within the new international division of labor. There is another way out, a democratic and progressive one, within the European framework, which has become the new arena for struggles by workers and by the peoples.”
Since Lemaitre is against socialist revolution, he can only conceive of opposition to the capitalist EU and the euro from the standpoint of right-wing nationalism. He cynically denounces “reactionary, chauvinist and nationalist propaganda that proposes returning to national currencies and withdrawing behind national boundaries.” In fact it is the bankruptcy of the left, the apostles of a “democratic and social” capitalist Europe, that puts wind in the sails of fascist demagogues, allowing them a monopoly on opposing the EU in whose name the workers’ gains are attacked. And it is German workers who are among the main victims of the austerity measures on behalf of “competitiveness” in Europe. The only two announced candidates in this election who oppose the euro are Marine Le Pen of the National Front and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an old-style far-right Gaullist politician.
The [Lambertist] Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) has its own chauvinist line of ultra-French delirium. At a February 13 Paris demonstration over the crisis in Greece, its members chanted slogans against the EU as an “American agency” and called for the EU/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank troika to get out of Paris, presumably to protect “la belle France” from their misdeeds. Thus the POI covers up the role of French imperialism in the oppression of Greece.
Protectionism: Reactionary Response to Capitalist Attacks
Throughout Europe, nationalism is on the rise, an ideological expression of the sharpening of rivalries between the continent’s bourgeoisies. To fight this, it is necessary to break openly with the reactionary fiction of European capitalist unity and to fight for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Today this particularly means solidarity with our class brothers in Greece who are being crushed under the jackboot of the French BNP bank, the Deutsche Bank and the European Central Bank. It is necessary to oppose the protectionist campaigns to tax imported products and “produce French” or “produce in France,” whether put forward by Sarkozy, Hollande or Mélenchon. It is necessary to oppose the chauvinist poison spewed by those rare “left” ideologues like Jacques Sapir and Jacques Nikonoff, who oppose the euro in the name of a better version of protectionism. In a Le Bolchévik No. 197 (September 2011) article that dealt with Michel Husson, a pro-euro economist fetishized by the NPA, we noted: “The NPA wants people to believe that capitalism can simply be reformed, and by promoting a supposedly ‘good’ protectionism it lends legitimacy to the protectionism of the National Front.”
Ditto for the PCF with its “produce French” slogan, which it just dredged up again a few months ago, and which has been picked up by the National Front. Today the National Front presents essentially a parliamentary package. But at bottom the fascists are paramilitary shock troops who carry out racist terror and whose ultimate target is the working class. The decaying capitalist system is the fertile terrain that nourishes the fascists. In the event of a sharp crisis, the bourgeoisie mobilizes them against the working class as it did in Germany in 1933. This is why the struggle against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. To crush them it is necessary to mobilize the working class in defense of Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and all the designated targets of the fascist scum. It is necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism—a perspective rejected by the union bureaucrats, since they seek to keep the unions chained to the capitalist order.
It is necessary to fight against layoffs, which threaten workers in plants that the capitalists are relocating as they try to maximize profits. But protectionism means seeking agreement with the French capitalists to keep plants located here, against the workers of other countries. It is flatly counterposed to a proletarian internationalist program, which is based on a common class struggle across national borders against these same capitalists, to defend and extend the workers’ gains. To fight against the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers for dividing workers along national lines, there needs to be struggle for wage increases, including at subsidiary companies and subcontractors in other countries. We must fight tooth and nail against layoffs, demanding the sharing of work between all hands, with the corresponding reduction in working hours without loss of pay. We must fight for all temporary workers and those on short-term contracts to get permanent jobs. Equal pay for equal work!
This requires struggle for industrial unions, which bring together in the same fighting organization all the workers at a given location—including those provided by subcontractors—whether it is a French or foreign company. And this in turn requires a fight for a new leadership in the unions, a revolutionary internationalist leadership replacing the bureaucrats, who are content with the division of unionized workers among several competing unions and who even accept the low level of unionization of workers since the bureaucrats’ apparatus is essentially financed by the bosses and the state.
The division of the working class along national lines, accompanied by protectionism, goes hand in hand with the division of the workers within the country along ethnic, racial and sexual lines. Mélenchon, protectionism’s clearest advocate among the candidates of the workers movement, has virtually nothing to say against the government’s racist campaigns in his 96-page platform. What is at stake, however, is nothing less than the unity of the multiethnic and multiracial proletariat of this country. Full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here! Down with the deportations of undocumented immigrants! The workers movement must defend ghetto youth! Down with the racist campaign against veiled women!
No Vote to LO!
Nathalie Arthaud, Lutte Ouvrière’s candidate, presents herself as the only “communist candidate.” She is trying to take advantage of the hesitancy of a significant number of PCF members about voting for Mélenchon. But Arthaud’s program has nothing to do with communism. Furthermore, LO has always been in favor of the EU and the euro. In their latest conference document (Lutte Ouvrière, December 2011-January 2012), they lament that in recent times “the few steps forward made by the bourgeoisie to overcome national rivalries, as in the field of monetary unification, are now in jeopardy.” They have always celebrated the supposedly “open borders” created by the Schengen Treaty [which ostensibly allows free movement between member states while erecting barriers against non-European immigrants]. Yet at any given time an estimated 100,000 people in the EU are in jail because they lack the required papers, and 140,000 are deported each year. And about 15,000 people have died in the past 20 years trying to penetrate this racist fortress.
LO claims to be “communist” but tramples on the most basic principles of the class struggle by refusing to show the working class that one should not vote for those allied with the bourgeois class enemy. LO decided at its recent congress in December not to take a position on whether to oppose Hollande until the evening of the first round of elections. LO’s candidacy is therefore a candidacy to pressure the popular front so that it will be slightly more to the left once in office. As Nathalie Arthaud’s election platform declared: “Even those among the plebeian electorate who, out of disgust with Sarkozy, will choose to vote for Hollande on the second round should express on the first round the fact that they distrust him, that they are keeping an eye on him and that, even with the left in power, they will impose their demands.” No vote for Nathalie Arthaud!
LO has never made any secret of the reformist character of its municipalism and its trade-union work. They wrote in Lutte de Classe (February 2008): “By definition, municipal activity as well as trade-union activity cannot be revolutionary; they are reformist.” As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre Mercier, a spokesman of Nathalie Arthaud and a member of the municipal majority running Bagnolet [a working-class city outside Paris] signed a special statement of political solidarity with the PCF mayor, Marc Everbecq. Supposedly describing the way Everbecq has been ruling the city, this statement defended “living together and in solidarity” as well as the mayor’s “citizenship building.” “Citizenship building” or racist demolition? The African workers who lived in a squat that was demolished on the orders of the mayor’s office with a backhoe two years ago will have their own opinion about that (see “Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics,” WV No. 960, 4 June 2010). Voting for the mayor’s budget, as Mercier has been doing for years, means paying for his backhoe.
LO defends its municipal reformism, arguing that this is a long tradition of the labor movement. That this is a tradition of the French workers movement is unfortunately true, but it was not true of Lenin. He fought hard in 1917 against his own comrades who wanted to continue precisely the reformist practice of the Second International in managing municipalities (See “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009). It is not by accident that for the past 50 years the French Constitution has required that candidates for the highest executive post be sponsored by a number of elected officials, the vast majority of whom are mayors who, on a daily basis, exercise just such an executive mandate.
At bottom, LO’s election program boils down to wanting to “impose on the bosses a ban on layoffs,” to “force the state to hire” and to “impose workers control in industry and banking,” along with wage increases and an automatic cost-of-living adjustment for inflation. They want this to be “imposed on the owners and the rulers, whoever they may be.” The problem is that imposing on the capitalists a “ban on layoffs” would mean forcing them to stop running their economy for the purpose of making profits—in other words, making them cease being themselves.
LO thinks that the workers’ vital needs can be “imposed...by a collective working-class struggle that is so massive and so explosive that it really threatens the capitalist class.... The capitalist class will not concede anything without feeling the anger of the working class and the threat to its own profits and wealth.” But when such an explosive struggle occurs, that’s when serious business starts, not where it ends: Either one is satisfied with having obtained these “basic needs” by posing threats or one goes forward to overthrow capitalism. LO clearly limits itself to the former perspective, thereby promising to repeat the PCF’s betrayals in the June 1936 and May 1968 general strikes, when the PCF made the workers return to work with a few economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, betraying the possibilities for socialist revolution. As always in such cases, the concessions achieved were immediately undermined by the capitalists, who are only satisfied when gains are emptied of their content.
Likewise, “workers control of industry and banking” can only be a phase in the workers’ struggle to impose their own organs of power, at the factory level and at the level of society as a whole, and to liquidate capitalist property for good. If such a perspective is not posed from a revolutionary standpoint, which LO does not do, it simply amounts to joint management, in which the union bureaucrats participate in decisions by the shareholders on how to increase the rate of profit on their investment. In this period of sharp capitalist crisis, it also means jointly overseeing layoffs and plant closings. The following words by Trotsky in the Transitional Program (1938) directly apply to LO:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.... Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism—and this occurs at each step—the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”
The workers movement has been beset by demoralization for the last 20 years, since the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the so-called “death of communism.” This demoralization only sharpens the contradiction between the objective tasks facing the proletariat and its low level of consciousness. But that does not change the fact that the only way to resolve this contradiction is to fight for a revolutionary working-class party. In the course of the class struggle, the working class acquires socialist consciousness not spontaneously (as LO preaches in its holiday speechifying) but through the intervention of a Leninist party.
In these elections there is no choice for the working people. No candidate presents—even on the first round, even in the crudest way—a line of class independence against Hollande and Sarkozy, the two main candidates whom the bourgeoisie is considering for leadership of French imperialism in the period ahead. Whoever is elected, the working class confronts a strengthening of the capitalist offensive against its gains. The workers will be all the better prepared for that confrontation if they refuse to heed the siren song of the popular front or vote for it. Above all, the working class needs a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership. We are fighting to build the Leninist party that will one day lead the workers to the victorious overthrow of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
From The "Bradley Manning Support Network" Website-"The Radicalization Of Bradley Manning"-A Play
Click on the headline to link to an entry from the Bradley Manning Support Network Website-The Radicalization Of Bradley Manning.
Markin comment:
Support freedom for Bradley Manning anyway and anywhere we can. Catch hte livestream.
Markin comment:
Support freedom for Bradley Manning anyway and anywhere we can. Catch hte livestream.
Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning During The Week Of April 23-29 In The Boston Area-Why I Will Be Standing With Private Manning On Friday April 27th In Davis Square, Somerville And Saturday April 28th At Park Street Station In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information on his case and activities on his behalf .
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
According to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network there are a series of actions planned in Washington, D.C at the Justice Department on April 24th and at Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th and 26th in connection with the next round of legal proceedings in his case. I had originally intended to travel down from Boston to take part in those events that week but some other obligations now prevent me from doing so. Nevertheless there two on-going activities in the Boston area where those of us who support freedom for Bradley Manning can show our solidarity during that week.
Every Friday from 1:00 -2:00 PM there is an on-going solidarity vigil for Brother Manning at the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop in Davis Square, Somerville.
Every Saturday from 1:00-2:00 PM there is an on-going peace vigil/speak-out in our struggle against the war (or wars) of the moment being orchestrated by the American government and its allies at the Redline MBTA Park Street Station in Boston (Boston Common). Bradley Manning’s case is a natural extension of those struggles.
Please plan to attend either or both of these events on Friday April 28th (Davis Square) and/or Saturday April 29th (Park Street) to stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning. I have included my original comment made when I had expected to go down to the Washington/Fort Meade events as motivation for you to stand with Bradley on those days here in Boston.
*************
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Fort Meade Maryland On Wednesday April 25th At 8:00 AM - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year (2011) I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq War timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Bradley Manning.
According to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network there are a series of actions planned in Washington, D.C at the Justice Department on April 24th and at Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th and 26th in connection with the next round of legal proceedings in his case. I had originally intended to travel down from Boston to take part in those events that week but some other obligations now prevent me from doing so. Nevertheless there two on-going activities in the Boston area where those of us who support freedom for Bradley Manning can show our solidarity during that week.
Every Friday from 1:00 -2:00 PM there is an on-going solidarity vigil for Brother Manning at the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop in Davis Square, Somerville.
Every Saturday from 1:00-2:00 PM there is an on-going peace vigil/speak-out in our struggle against the war (or wars) of the moment being orchestrated by the American government and its allies at the Redline MBTA Park Street Station in Boston (Boston Common). Bradley Manning’s case is a natural extension of those struggles.
Please plan to attend either or both of these events on Friday April 28th (Davis Square) and/or Saturday April 29th (Park Street) to stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning. I have included my original comment made when I had expected to go down to the Washington/Fort Meade events as motivation for you to stand with Bradley on those days here in Boston.
*************
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Fort Meade Maryland On Wednesday April 25th At 8:00 AM - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year (2011) I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Young Spartacus," November 1975- "Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary"-The Demise Of A Black Panther Party Leader
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1960s Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Clever.
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this entry:
Make no mistake the demise of the Black Panther Party through state repression and internal party wrangling rather than political defeat by communist revolutionaries was not an unimportant part of the demise of the entire radical movement in the early 1970s and has left us a huge gap to fill. So read this entry with care-those sisters and brothers like Cleaver represented, for a time, a very, very decent instinct to right the racial wrongs that are the bedrock of American society-and have been embedded there since its beginning.
********
Editorial Note-Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary-Young Spartacus, November, 1975
From exile Eldridge Cleaver, renowned former leader of the Black Panther Party, recently has repudiated revolutionary politics in an ultra-patriotic bid for a pardon enabling him to return to the U.S. by the Fourth of July.
Seldom has the ruling class spurned a disillusioned radical leader who renounces his cause and courts the bourgeois "establishment." Especially now, when the government's dirty laundry is being laundered publicly, defenders of the status quo can certainly make use of ex-radicals willing to support a discredited social system by "testifying" that there are no alternatives. Thus, the media has assisted former New Left ideologue Tom Hayden—who in 1972 followed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" onto the campaign trail of "dove" Democrat George McGovern —to achieve new celebrity now as a pseudo-populist Democratic Party senatorial hopeful in California (see "It's Mr. Hayden Now, If You Please," Young Spartacus, September 1975).
Fashionable, socially well-connected renegades like Hayden can easily traipse back to the bourgeois fold. But in this deeply racist society, charismatic black leaders who rose to political stature through flamboyant defiance of the racist order cannot expect to find the bourgeois state so accommodating. This recognition may well be the motivation for Cleaver's grotesque gestures of capitulation and desperate anti-communist tirades.
Eldridge Cleaver recently made his startling debut in Paris as "Eldridge de Paris," the revolutionary-turned-"radical chic" men's fashion designer. Probably only to attract publicity, Cleaver designed and modeled some "revolutionary hot pants" with a crotch shaped into an attenuated pouch, like a medieval codpiece. As his Soul On Ice several years ago revealed, Cleaver is far from naive; he is certainly well aware of the sexual stereotypes of the black male and their role in the pathological psychology of white racism. His obscene "hot pants" can only be regarded as a costume tailored according to the debased image of the black man projected by the Ku Klux Klan. The spectacle of Cleaver, the once self-sacrificing revolutionary leader, presenting blacks as an object for ridicule by sniggering racists is truly sickening. In the attempt to crawl back into the bourgeoisie's good graces, Cleaver is willing to fan the murderous flames of white racism.
Cleaver has groomed himself politically by an equally grotesque grovelling before the imperialist appetites of the ruling class of this country. In an interview with Rolling Stone (11 September), that soft-pulp rag which slickly trafficks "counterculture," Cleaver performs a sickening "step-'n'-f etchit" routine for the Pentagon:
"I now think that the U.S. should be second to none militarily, that we have to strengthen, not demise, our military.... I, for one, intend to develop a new relationship with the U.S. military. I'm on a honeymoon with them myself. I love 'em. (much laughter) "However, experience has shown socialists/communists strap onto people the most oppressive regimes in the history of the world.... I want to see the American military establishment's power supporting people who are being fucked over in the world. ... If we are truly the force for democracy in the world, then we have an obligation to help in the disintegration of the totalitarian Soviet regime."
Cleaver's defection is political and must be placed in the context of the development and demise of the Black Panther Party and, more generally, the brutal oppression of black people in this racist society. Like Malcolm X, George Jackson and so many other black radical leaders, Eldridge Cleaver came to political consciousness through generalizing his individual victimization at the hands of racist "law and order" into an elemental resistance to brutal oppression of the black masses by this capitalist system. In this racist society the leap from prison-hardened, street-wise lumpen life to socialist consciousness and disciplined functioning for a black person is enormous. Cleaver partially overcame a lumpen, criminal, "hustler" existence by seeking to become part of a struggle on behalf of the oppressed black masses.
But the black militants who built the Black Panther Party embodied profound contradictions, encompassing both true heroism and lumpen hustlerism. The Black Panther Party combined militant self-defense of the ghetto against racist cop terrorization with politically reformist, pragmatic social work (such as "serving the people" through the breakfast for children program).
The massive, unrelenting and murderous state repression unleashed against the Panthers exacerbated the contradiction between the impulse toward lumpen-based urban guerrilla confrontations with the state and the pressure to accommodate the liberal establishment for protection. This contradiction in the Panthers' politics led to the devastating split in 1971 between • the pro-capitalist and openly reformist wing led by Huey Newton and the proto-terrorist/"armed struggle" wing, with which Cleaver was associated (see "Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era," Workers Vanguard, January 1972).
Isolated in exile, Cleaver soon became disillusioned with "third-world" nationalism. While certainly no political ingenug and always exploiting his various "third-world" patrons for creature comforts and political elevation, Cleaver's reconciliation with imperialism was facilitated by the hollow-ness of the "revolutionary" rhetoric of radical-nationalist bourgeois regimes such as Algeria and by the willingness of the parasitic bureaucracies ruling in China, Cuba and the other deformed workers states to betray the oppressed for "detente" with world imperialism.
As Cleaver related to Rolling Stone,
"When I left the U.S. I went first to Cuba, then to Algeria, China, North Vietnam and North Korea. Face it, people are nationalists more than they are internationalists and they use internationalism in a very cynical way in order to further their own nationalist aspirations.... The final shock came the day I saw Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao, When you see Nixon and all that he stands for shaking hands with Mao and all that he supposedly stood for—well, it marks a turning point in history and a personal turning point for me."
Cleaver did not flee the U.S. in an act of cowardice. He was instructed to escape by the Panther leadership, but only after he had prepared himself for "revolutionary suicide": a final, heroic shoot-out with the cops who were hunting him down like an animal. Eldridge Cleaver is at bottom a victim of this racist capitalist state. His final political disintegration was assisted by bitter disillusionment with the cynical betrayals of Stalinism.
Cleaver rose from a socially marginal existence as a ghetto "hustler" to a leader of the organization which represented the most subjectively revolutionary expression of the non-Marxist ideology of black nationalism. That organization was destroyed by political contradictions and state repression. Now Cleaver has returned again to "hustling" as ''Eldridge de Paris." In this sense, his repudiation of revolutionary politics is a hollow victory for the ruling class.
Cleaver's defection is tragic. Yet it should be regarded as only the final curtain to a far greater tragedy: the loss of so many subjectively revolutionary and self-sacrificing black militants through political demoralization and cop repression.
A large burden of the responsibility for the demise of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization must be placed squarely on the shoulders of all those self-proclaimed radical organizations which for years opportunistically refused to struggle politically with the Panthers. The white-guilt-ridden Maoist/ New Left wing of SDS (whose leaders went on to form the October League, the Revolutionary Union/ Revolutionary Communist Party and the Weather Underground) wallowed in vicarious nationalism and mindlessly enthused over the Panthers, denouncing any criticism of Panther politics as "counterrevolutionary." The International Socialists always kept its criticism hushed, while attempting to broker a Panther/left-liberal alliance through building the reformist Peace and Freedom Party. The Socialist Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance urged the Panthers to become more "nationalist," meaning a retreat into more respectable "community control" politics. And the Communist Party sought to seduce the Panthers into embracing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Although our forces were numerically small and our authority on the left weak during the crucial period prior to the devastating split, the Spartacist League struggled to the best of our abilities to engage the Panthers in political discussion and to win the most subjectively revolutionary cadres to a Leninist perspective. We did not capitulate to the popularity of multi-vanguardist/"third-worldist" illusions, seeking instead to pose a proletarian perspective for the subjectively revolutionary elements of the militant black movement. Instead of glamorizing the lumpen adventurism of the Panthers, we fought for a truly revolutionary program. Only such a perspective could have combatted the decimation of the Panther cadres by organized cop terror and could have preserved a revolutionary wing of the black movement when the besieged Panther organization veered sharply toward "respectability" in the form of a turn to the Democratic Party under the auspices of the Communist Party in the period of the United Front Against Facism.
Eldridge Cleaver has passed over to the class enemy. To acknowledge his political demise is bitter indeed. But the struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution can advance only if the costly lessons of the political destruction of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization are assimilated.
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this entry:
Make no mistake the demise of the Black Panther Party through state repression and internal party wrangling rather than political defeat by communist revolutionaries was not an unimportant part of the demise of the entire radical movement in the early 1970s and has left us a huge gap to fill. So read this entry with care-those sisters and brothers like Cleaver represented, for a time, a very, very decent instinct to right the racial wrongs that are the bedrock of American society-and have been embedded there since its beginning.
********
Editorial Note-Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary-Young Spartacus, November, 1975
From exile Eldridge Cleaver, renowned former leader of the Black Panther Party, recently has repudiated revolutionary politics in an ultra-patriotic bid for a pardon enabling him to return to the U.S. by the Fourth of July.
Seldom has the ruling class spurned a disillusioned radical leader who renounces his cause and courts the bourgeois "establishment." Especially now, when the government's dirty laundry is being laundered publicly, defenders of the status quo can certainly make use of ex-radicals willing to support a discredited social system by "testifying" that there are no alternatives. Thus, the media has assisted former New Left ideologue Tom Hayden—who in 1972 followed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" onto the campaign trail of "dove" Democrat George McGovern —to achieve new celebrity now as a pseudo-populist Democratic Party senatorial hopeful in California (see "It's Mr. Hayden Now, If You Please," Young Spartacus, September 1975).
Fashionable, socially well-connected renegades like Hayden can easily traipse back to the bourgeois fold. But in this deeply racist society, charismatic black leaders who rose to political stature through flamboyant defiance of the racist order cannot expect to find the bourgeois state so accommodating. This recognition may well be the motivation for Cleaver's grotesque gestures of capitulation and desperate anti-communist tirades.
Eldridge Cleaver recently made his startling debut in Paris as "Eldridge de Paris," the revolutionary-turned-"radical chic" men's fashion designer. Probably only to attract publicity, Cleaver designed and modeled some "revolutionary hot pants" with a crotch shaped into an attenuated pouch, like a medieval codpiece. As his Soul On Ice several years ago revealed, Cleaver is far from naive; he is certainly well aware of the sexual stereotypes of the black male and their role in the pathological psychology of white racism. His obscene "hot pants" can only be regarded as a costume tailored according to the debased image of the black man projected by the Ku Klux Klan. The spectacle of Cleaver, the once self-sacrificing revolutionary leader, presenting blacks as an object for ridicule by sniggering racists is truly sickening. In the attempt to crawl back into the bourgeoisie's good graces, Cleaver is willing to fan the murderous flames of white racism.
Cleaver has groomed himself politically by an equally grotesque grovelling before the imperialist appetites of the ruling class of this country. In an interview with Rolling Stone (11 September), that soft-pulp rag which slickly trafficks "counterculture," Cleaver performs a sickening "step-'n'-f etchit" routine for the Pentagon:
"I now think that the U.S. should be second to none militarily, that we have to strengthen, not demise, our military.... I, for one, intend to develop a new relationship with the U.S. military. I'm on a honeymoon with them myself. I love 'em. (much laughter) "However, experience has shown socialists/communists strap onto people the most oppressive regimes in the history of the world.... I want to see the American military establishment's power supporting people who are being fucked over in the world. ... If we are truly the force for democracy in the world, then we have an obligation to help in the disintegration of the totalitarian Soviet regime."
Cleaver's defection is political and must be placed in the context of the development and demise of the Black Panther Party and, more generally, the brutal oppression of black people in this racist society. Like Malcolm X, George Jackson and so many other black radical leaders, Eldridge Cleaver came to political consciousness through generalizing his individual victimization at the hands of racist "law and order" into an elemental resistance to brutal oppression of the black masses by this capitalist system. In this racist society the leap from prison-hardened, street-wise lumpen life to socialist consciousness and disciplined functioning for a black person is enormous. Cleaver partially overcame a lumpen, criminal, "hustler" existence by seeking to become part of a struggle on behalf of the oppressed black masses.
But the black militants who built the Black Panther Party embodied profound contradictions, encompassing both true heroism and lumpen hustlerism. The Black Panther Party combined militant self-defense of the ghetto against racist cop terrorization with politically reformist, pragmatic social work (such as "serving the people" through the breakfast for children program).
The massive, unrelenting and murderous state repression unleashed against the Panthers exacerbated the contradiction between the impulse toward lumpen-based urban guerrilla confrontations with the state and the pressure to accommodate the liberal establishment for protection. This contradiction in the Panthers' politics led to the devastating split in 1971 between • the pro-capitalist and openly reformist wing led by Huey Newton and the proto-terrorist/"armed struggle" wing, with which Cleaver was associated (see "Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era," Workers Vanguard, January 1972).
Isolated in exile, Cleaver soon became disillusioned with "third-world" nationalism. While certainly no political ingenug and always exploiting his various "third-world" patrons for creature comforts and political elevation, Cleaver's reconciliation with imperialism was facilitated by the hollow-ness of the "revolutionary" rhetoric of radical-nationalist bourgeois regimes such as Algeria and by the willingness of the parasitic bureaucracies ruling in China, Cuba and the other deformed workers states to betray the oppressed for "detente" with world imperialism.
As Cleaver related to Rolling Stone,
"When I left the U.S. I went first to Cuba, then to Algeria, China, North Vietnam and North Korea. Face it, people are nationalists more than they are internationalists and they use internationalism in a very cynical way in order to further their own nationalist aspirations.... The final shock came the day I saw Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao, When you see Nixon and all that he stands for shaking hands with Mao and all that he supposedly stood for—well, it marks a turning point in history and a personal turning point for me."
Cleaver did not flee the U.S. in an act of cowardice. He was instructed to escape by the Panther leadership, but only after he had prepared himself for "revolutionary suicide": a final, heroic shoot-out with the cops who were hunting him down like an animal. Eldridge Cleaver is at bottom a victim of this racist capitalist state. His final political disintegration was assisted by bitter disillusionment with the cynical betrayals of Stalinism.
Cleaver rose from a socially marginal existence as a ghetto "hustler" to a leader of the organization which represented the most subjectively revolutionary expression of the non-Marxist ideology of black nationalism. That organization was destroyed by political contradictions and state repression. Now Cleaver has returned again to "hustling" as ''Eldridge de Paris." In this sense, his repudiation of revolutionary politics is a hollow victory for the ruling class.
Cleaver's defection is tragic. Yet it should be regarded as only the final curtain to a far greater tragedy: the loss of so many subjectively revolutionary and self-sacrificing black militants through political demoralization and cop repression.
A large burden of the responsibility for the demise of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization must be placed squarely on the shoulders of all those self-proclaimed radical organizations which for years opportunistically refused to struggle politically with the Panthers. The white-guilt-ridden Maoist/ New Left wing of SDS (whose leaders went on to form the October League, the Revolutionary Union/ Revolutionary Communist Party and the Weather Underground) wallowed in vicarious nationalism and mindlessly enthused over the Panthers, denouncing any criticism of Panther politics as "counterrevolutionary." The International Socialists always kept its criticism hushed, while attempting to broker a Panther/left-liberal alliance through building the reformist Peace and Freedom Party. The Socialist Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance urged the Panthers to become more "nationalist," meaning a retreat into more respectable "community control" politics. And the Communist Party sought to seduce the Panthers into embracing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Although our forces were numerically small and our authority on the left weak during the crucial period prior to the devastating split, the Spartacist League struggled to the best of our abilities to engage the Panthers in political discussion and to win the most subjectively revolutionary cadres to a Leninist perspective. We did not capitulate to the popularity of multi-vanguardist/"third-worldist" illusions, seeking instead to pose a proletarian perspective for the subjectively revolutionary elements of the militant black movement. Instead of glamorizing the lumpen adventurism of the Panthers, we fought for a truly revolutionary program. Only such a perspective could have combatted the decimation of the Panther cadres by organized cop terror and could have preserved a revolutionary wing of the black movement when the besieged Panther organization veered sharply toward "respectability" in the form of a turn to the Democratic Party under the auspices of the Communist Party in the period of the United Front Against Facism.
Eldridge Cleaver has passed over to the class enemy. To acknowledge his political demise is bitter indeed. But the struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution can advance only if the costly lessons of the political destruction of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization are assimilated.
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