Workers Vanguard No. 1087
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8 April 2016
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France-Protests Against Anti-Union Law-Down With the “War on Terror” and Racist Police-State Measures!
As they have in a series of recent mass demonstrations, large contingents of high school and university students joined the March 31 protests, which in several cities were twice as large as the March 9 day of action. Around the country, tear gas, water cannons, horses and brute force were used by the forces of “law and order” against the youth. In Marseille, as elsewhere, cops attacked the youth who did not immediately disperse at the end of the demonstration; the clouds of tear gas were so thick that people in nearby sidewalk cafés were forced to flee. In Lyon, fascists attacked student demonstrators and were defended by the riot cops. In Rouen, as police attacked students with tear gas, a large contingent of longshoremen, joined by other workers, came to the students’ defense, forcing the cops to back down. Hands off the student youth! Drop the charges against all those arrested!
The proposed law is the latest in a series of brutal anti-labor laws pushed by the government of Socialist Party (PS) president François Hollande. The government has also been cracking down with unprecedented severity on working-class resistance. In January, eight trade-union militants, arrested while opposing the closure of a Goodyear plant in Amiens, were sentenced to nine months in prison. Five Air France workers face up to three years in prison after two managers literally lost their shirts at a strike rally in October.
The attacks on labor come in the context of the state of emergency that the government declared last November after the hideous ISIS massacre of 130 people in Paris and has extended until May. The police have conducted thousands of warrantless raids on homes, especially in largely Muslim neighborhoods, at all hours of the day and night. Hundreds of people were placed under house arrest, including ecologists who were planning a demonstration on the eve of December’s climate conference in Paris. Widespread surveillance measures allow police to record telephone conversations.
We print below a translation of a March 21 supplement to Le Bolchévik, newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League, which was distributed at the March 31 demonstrations in Paris, Rouen and other major cities.
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The government no doubt thought that the surge of racist “national unity” following the criminal attacks on November 13 would allow it to pass its El Khomri bill without much trouble. Even the French Communist Party (PCF) voted for the state of emergency. Last year, it was in the wake of the anti-Muslim “I am Charlie” wave of national unity [see “France: Down With ‘War on Terror’ Repression!” WV No. 1060, 23 January 2015] that Hollande and [Prime Minister Manuel] Valls got the [anti-labor] Macron Law passed. But their plan could derail as the El Khomri bill has become the focal point for the hatred of this racist capitalist government that has built up over almost four years. Hundreds of thousands of workers and youth demonstrated on March 9, and again on March 17, to demand the withdrawal of the bill.
The El Khomri bill aims to make employment qualitatively more precarious by allowing employers to fire workers for virtually no reason, with little notice and at almost no cost. The bosses could impose a fixed pay rate, meaning that ten- or twelve-hour workdays would be paid the same as seven-hour days. To introduce such a measure, an employer would simply need a formal agreement with his employees, including by way of a so-called “workplace referendum.” This is an open assault against the unions. In small or medium-sized enterprises, all an employer needs to do to organize such a referendum is to win over a single “authorized employee.” In larger companies, management only needs the support of one or several trade-union representatives as long as their unions received even a combined 30 percent in elections [to various elected posts and workplace committees mandated by French law]. This would be the culmination of years of anti-union attacks that have often been carried out with the active collaboration of the union bureaucracy (such as the Sarkozy Law [which aimed at further tightening government and management control over the unions]). Down with the El Khomri law!
Meanwhile, the government has continued to bring charges against workers in struggle—and now against militant youth. Drop all charges against the Air France and Goodyear trade unionists and against protesters arrested in recent days! The fact that the unions today are weak, with less than eight percent of the workforce unionized, is not enough for the French capitalists. There are clearly some, including in the government, who think that it is possible to do without the collaboration of the trade-union bureaucracy altogether. They believe that class struggle is finished—except for that waged by the capitalists against the workers. Valls, Hollande: Hands off the unions!
The anti-union aspect of the El Khomri law is scarcely mentioned even by the left, which focuses on defending the “Labor Code” [the body of French labor laws and regulations governing everything from working conditions to workplace elections]. For example, in a March 14 editorial, Lutte Ouvrière [LO] declared that “the Labor Code is under threat,” thus sowing the illusion that the Labor Code in itself represents a gain for the working class and that the capitalist state stands above social classes. In reality, the Labor Code merely sets the framework within which the workers are forced to sell their labor power in order to eke out a living. For the most part, the Code specifies the advantages that are granted to various types of employers in particular circumstances. The remainder of the Code represents gains that we defend, gains resulting from workers’ struggles in the streets and on the picket lines.
Laurent Berger, leader of the CFDT union federation, rushed to endorse the El Khomri bill after a few cosmetic adjustments were made. As for the leaderships of the CGT, FO and SUD union federations, they only reluctantly called for the March 9 mobilizations. For four years, they hardly uttered a word against the attacks carried out by this capitalist government—because it was their government. In 2012, CGT leader Bernard Thibault officially called to vote for François Hollande. The union bureaucrats’ worldview does not extend beyond the administration of French capitalism, which today more than ever means the increasing destruction of the gains of the working class.
However, one must not throw the baby out with the bath water: Despite the betrayals of the bureaucrats, the unions are organizations for the basic economic defense of the working class at the point of production. The fight to defend the unions is the starting point for any defense of working-class gains, including the most basic, such as the seven- or eight-hour workday. The working class must oust the traitors at the head of the unions and replace them with a class-struggle leadership that will strengthen the unions. This fight is part and parcel of the fight for a revolutionary workers vanguard party.
Reformists Channeled Anti-CPE Struggle into Votes for PS
Ten years ago, the [right-wing] Chirac-Sarkozy-Villepin government also tried to ride the waves of a racist campaign against youth of North African and African origin, who had just risen up as part of a revolt in the banlieues [minority and working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities]. That government put forward a measure, the “First Employment Contract” (CPE), which would have generalized lack of job security for all newly hired youth [who could be fired without cause]. University and high school students demonstrated for weeks, during which time the government tried to fan the flames of racism by campaigning against banlieue high school students, who were labeled “casseurs” [hooligans]. But the labor movement increasingly mobilized its forces until the government withdrew the CPE.
A youth mobilization can be the spark for a widespread mobilization of workers, as was the case in May 1968 or with the CPE in 2006. But it is the working class that has the social power to stay the hand of the capitalists and their government because it is the workers who produce the wealth and profits appropriated by the capitalists in the factories, ports, refineries, transportation, etc. By stopping work, the workers can bring the entire economy to a standstill.
The fight against the CPE marked the last significant political victory against the capitalist government in France to be won through mass mobilizations. Since then, workers have repeatedly suffered huge setbacks, and the El Khomri law is even more brutal than the CPE. Why is this? How can we prevent this from happening again?
Ten years ago, we warned that the reformists would divert the mobilization into the presidential elections the following year. And indeed, the PCF, the [predecessor of the] NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party] and Lutte Ouvrière called for a vote to [Socialist Party candidate] Ségolène Royal in 2007. Not content with this betrayal, they repeated it five years later when they campaigned for François Hollande in the second round of the 2012 presidential elections. (LO, for its part, refused to explicitly call for abstention.) In contrast, we said, both in 2007 and in 2012, that the election offered no choice for workers.
In the March issue of their newspaper, l’Etincelle Anticapitaliste, the NPA youth group now states:
“2010: eight million people in the streets, refineries blockaded, two and a half months of mobilizations. But the pension reform was passed, and everyone looked to the 2012 presidential elections. Hollande took advantage of this to cash in on votes. Four years later, millions of people have experienced this particularly nefarious socialist government, which has not only carried out the bosses’ agenda, but was able to do so thanks to the ‘left,’ with the consent of the leadership of the major unions.”
But in 2010 the NPA itself steered workers toward the elections, with its spokesman Olivier Besancenot stating that “the pensions struggle will be a decisive factor in the outcome of 2012. Now is the time to weaken the [right-wing] government and the right” (Tout Est à Nous, 2 September 2010).
Unlike in 2006 or 2010, today’s attacks against workers and youth are being waged by a nominally “left-wing” capitalist government. The PS is sharply divided at the top between those who want to remain social-democratic traitors and those, like Valls, who want to break openly with the labor movement and become outright bourgeois politicians.
Reformist workers parties are in decline across Europe. In Italy the former Communist Party has become an outright bourgeois party, the Democratic Party of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Aside from the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon in the British Labour Party, a significant number of workers have turned to bourgeois populists, who no longer even claim to stand for the working class (Podemos in Spain, Syriza and Popular Unity in Greece)—that is, when they don’t turn toward the populism of the far-right (in France, the FN [National Front]). On the left in France we have [Left Party leader] Jean-Luc Mélenchon proclaiming an “era of the people” that will supposedly turn the page on the “era of the proletariat.”
For reformists today, like those of the NPA in 2010, a labor mobilization in the streets and the factories would serve as the starting point for forging a new parliamentary dead end, a popular-front alliance including “left-wing” bourgeois formations (the Greens, supporters of Mélenchon, etc.) and social democrats (PS dissidents, PCF), with the NPA and others in tow. If it isn’t [prominent PS dissident Martine] Aubry, it will be Mélenchon or someone else.
No! Down with class collaboration with the bourgeoisie! It is necessary to break the endless cycle of “left-wing” capitalist governments—each more anti-working-class than its predecessor—followed by a strong comeback by reactionary forces. Because of its role in production, the proletariat is the only social class that has the power and historic interest to overthrow the entire capitalist system through socialist revolution, led by a party like the Bolsheviks, who led the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Down With the European Union and the Euro!
The El Khomri law is intended to hammer the final nail in the coffin of the so-called “welfare state,” to modernize France and prevent it from losing more ground to its competitors. Emmanuel Macron, the Minister of the Economy, stated: “This will enable us to bring France into line with European Union law. This is the first step toward adapting our economy to the modern world, which will introduce more flexibility and at the same time more individual security, not based on statutory or corporatist arrangements” (Le Monde, 17 March).
The European Union (EU) is a reactionary and unstable bloc between rival powers. Every “Directive from Brussels” [headquarters of the EU] amounts to a further attack against workers in each EU country. While German imperialism is today the main beneficiary of the EU, the second is none other than its French rival, which is no less rapacious toward Greece, for example, than are the Frankfurt bankers. Down with the EU and the euro!
By continuing to push for the European Union to be reformed in a more “social” direction, the reformists leave the door wide open for the FN, allowing the latter to present itself as the only genuine opponent of the EU. Instead of fighting for international working-class unity against the capitalists, the CGT union bureaucrats are campaigning to “produce in France,” stirring up chauvinism that the FN feeds off. Workers have no country!
Under capitalism, all gains made by the working class are absolutely reversible. Following World War II, the capitalists were forced to grant significant concessions to the workers, particularly in West Europe where they were faced with militant struggles as well as the threat to the international capitalist order represented by the Soviet Union, born of the October Revolution, and East Europe. In these countries, the capitalists had been expropriated even though political power was usurped by a parasitic caste of Stalinist bureaucrats.
The fight to defend gains achieved by the working class here went hand in hand with unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and East European countries against imperialist threats and the danger of counterrevolution. At the time, we Trotskyists uniquely fought for that program. Our perspective for the East was proletarian political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucrats and establish political power based on workers councils (soviets), and for the West, workers revolution to oust the capitalists. The capitalist counterrevolution in East Europe and the Soviet Union 25 years ago was an enormous defeat for workers throughout the world.
We are fighting not only against temporary demoralization in the wake of that defeat. The very perspective of a classless socialist society must be re-instilled in the consciousness of the workers and oppressed. With the supposed “death of communism,” the older generation no longer believes in that perspective. As for youth, they cannot even conceive of a communist society of abundance for all, a society that functions according to the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The struggle to re-instill Marxism in the working class goes hand in hand with the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers vanguard party.
For a Class-Struggle Perspective!
Not only do the unions organize only a minority of workers, but they are also divided among several union federations. That allows the government today, for example, to set the CFDT against the CGT. A class-struggle leadership would seek to organize all workers in an industry in a single industrial union, including temporary workers and subcontractors, to put an end to the race to the bottom for work contracts. One industry, one union! Such unions will only emerge as a result of great class battles, and in opposition to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the CGT, CFDT, FO, etc.
Faced with the threat of endless increases in working hours for those who still have jobs, the CGT now calls for a 32-hour workweek. All well and good, but given the current unemployment rate, it will take more than that to provide work for everyone! What is necessary is the sharing of available work among all hands with no loss in pay.
The most basic demands against the scourge of unemployment always come up against the capitalists’ rapacious drive for profit. Naturally, the capitalists will argue that it is not possible and that their finances don’t allow it, in spite of the CICE [tax credits] and other billions in subsidies that this government showers on them. In response, a revolutionary leadership would say: Very well, let’s open the books—the workers themselves will expose the bosses’ swindles. That poses the question of strike committees, factory committees, and ultimately of soviets. As Trotsky stated in the 1938 Transitional Program:
“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”
Down With the Racist Security Laws!
The “war on terror” has twin manifestations: internally through repression against the French and immigrant Muslim population, and externally through bloody military interventions in Mali, Libya and Syria. One cannot genuinely oppose one without opposing the other. In order to get the El Khomri bill passed, the government seeks to pit non-Muslims against Muslims. It can only be defeated by opposing all aspects of the “war on terror.” French troops out of Africa and the Near East!
The government is attacking and expelling refugees fleeing wars waged by the imperialists in Syria and elsewhere. It is even seeking to give itself the power to strip people of their French citizenship. [After the publication of this supplement, President Hollande was forced to drop that plan.] This targets a strategic component of the working class—precisely those who are least likely to join in national unity to save French capitalism. Against this outrage, the labor movement should fight for full citizenship rights for all who are here, and against all expulsions. No stripping of nationality! Down with the state of emergency!
Hollande is currently writing into law all the arbitrary practices of the cops, including nighttime raids and spying on private communications. He promises the cops impunity while increasing their allocation of military weapons. The police, judges, prison guards and military are the repressive arm of the bourgeoisie, the core of the bourgeois state. The “war on terror” simply serves to disguise the real function of the police: preserving capitalist private property by means of violence while cracking down on any hint of revolt by the oppressed, and especially by the working class. The criminalization of students fighting against the El Khomri law has already begun. Down with Vigipirate and Sentinelle [racist police/army “anti-terror” operations]! Cops, security guards and prison guards, out of the unions!
For Labor/Minority Mobilizations Against the Fascists!
The bourgeoisie has yet another weapon for repressing the working class. If parliamentary shenanigans and everyday police repression were to prove insufficient to contain labor protests, or to head off a revolutionary offensive of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie would have no qualms about resorting to the fascists, who serve as its “extraparliamentary” armed gangs.
The fascists frequently attacked striking students and workers in the final phase of the struggle against the CPE, as well as railway workers during the struggle against pension “reform” in 2010. It is necessary to stop the fascists while they are still relatively small and weak paramilitary groups, through mass labor mobilizations backed by ethnic, racial and sexual minorities who are directly threatened by these scum.
Fascism is a phenomenon intrinsic to capitalism in the imperialist era. It is based on mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie threatened with ruin as a result of the endless crisis of capitalism. The reformist labor misleaders, concerned as they are with managing the system on behalf of big business, inevitably push into the arms of the fascists those layers threatened with downward social mobility, strangled by debt and stuck in single-family homes on the outskirts of urban areas while factories around them are closing. This is the basis for the National Front’s current electoral success.
The economic crisis besetting the capitalist system has no solution within the framework of a single country. It is necessary not only to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish workers rule through a revolution led by a Leninist party, but also to seek an international solution by extending the revolution to the entire continent and the whole world. The struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe goes hand in hand with the struggle to reforge the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky.
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