ON THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY

ON THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY

COMMENTARY

In the wake of his victory in the recent French presidential elections the conservative administration of President Sarkozy has successfully co-opted a number of opponent Socialist party functionaries onto his team. As a result they, for the most part, have been expelled. However their defections point to turmoil about the future of that party. Let us be clear- the modern post World II rabidly anti-communist French Socialist party has been an almost purely electoral operation somewhat akin to the Democratic Party in the United States. Its connection to the working class as a leftist organization has been centered on the white collar professional workers, students, teachers and the French version of the American AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy. As such it has been solely committed, at best, to a parliamentary perspective of taking the rough edges off the administration of the capitalist system. The recent election campaign of the Socialist candidate Royal exemplified that approach.

Historically the industrial working class was, and to a very minor extent still is, loyal to the Stalinist Communist party. With the demise of the Soviet Union, and even before that with its Euro-communist strategy, that party has fallen on hard times. Nevertheless both parties have lived and died by their dependence on the ‘popular front’ concept of parliamentary political struggle. For those unfamiliar with the concept the popular front is an explicit and conscious agreement presented by working class parties to bourgeois formations under a minimum program. Almost universally it is a parliamentary tactic and almost universally as well it has acted as a break on class struggle, if not worse as Chile in the 1970’s graphically demonstrated. Today, as if to symbolize the inadequacy of that strategy both ostensibly socialist organizations are now in decline. Yet the working class of France, including its somewhat strategic immigrant sector, is in dire need of a party that represents its historic interests and fights the class struggle on its behalf.

This, it seems to me, represents an excellent time to regroup the militant forces of the left in France around a class struggle program. Historically the far-left, the so-called ‘ultras’ (essentially the various ostensibly Trotskyist tendencies, the dissident left Stalinists, anarchists and at one time the Maoists) have played around the fringes of parliamentary politics. In the end, however, these groups have bought into the popular front strategy of the major left wing parties. Nowhere was this more evident that in the second round of the 2002 presidential elections where the choice was between the conservative reactionary Chirac and the virulently reactionary LePen. The ‘far left’ fell all over itself in calling for a vote for Chirac under the assumption that LePen represented an incipient fascist takeover of the democratic republic. The ‘popular front’ proved then to be very broad indeed. Now, with the situation in France very fluid as leftists wait for the Sarkozy government to drop the other shoe, is the time to break out of this never-ending parliamentary cycle and create, at first, a propaganda group or small mass party, committed explicitly to the fight for an alternative socialist system. The first step, but only the first step, is to place in mothballs that old ‘popular front’ strategy that has been central to French leftist politics since the French Revolution. As I have pointed out elsewhere in review of a history of the French Revolution by Georges LeFebvre the popular front between the bourgeois elements like Robespierre and the sans-culottes in that revolution at that time made sense. Today, no. More on this latter as I get a better grip on what is happening specifically with French far left groupings. Remember this though- in the end if the Socialist party is not politically defeated by the left it will rear its ugly head again. And as under the Socialists Mitterrand and Josplin in the recent past it will not be pretty.
Enough said.