FRANCE
From May of 1968 to November of 2005, 37 years of huge ideological abyss!
Article retrieved from the Luta Operária newspaper # 116, November/05
The up rising of young second-generation of immigrants that exploded in the working-class suburbs of Paris, spreading to many other French cities since the end of October/05, made us to remember the radicalization of the young people manifested during the French May of 1968.
However, there is a profound ideological abyss between the revolts occurred in nowadays to the young revolutionary impetus of 1968. At that time, the young rebellions were directly connected to the workers’ movement. A year before 68, the workers started to promote an intense wave of strikes around France. It reflected the workers’ class resistance to measures that were assaulting their wages, causing unemployment and attempting against the proletarian social conquests such as social security and the right to strikes. The politics adopted by the General Charles De Gaulle’s government were, back then, implemented in order to confront the crisis of prosperity generated by the economic pos-war debility. This period was characterized by the reorganization of the French industry, destroyed during the Second World War.
The fusion between the young people’s fights and the workers’ spontaneous strikes, with pickets and occupation of fabrics, transformed the students’ revolt into a masses’ insurgency. About 10 million workers went into strike, causing the rupture of the class-collaboration politics used by the directions of the labor unions controlled by the Stalinism.
The principal factories and the economic strategic sectors were putted under the workers’ control through strike committees. The committees were responsible for the rebellion’s auto-defense, for the control of production and for the construction of barricades. They also had the responsibility to supply the workers under strike with food. It was established a duality of power which putted the bourgeois dominion under doubt.
Back then, since the beginning, the movement assumed a clear revolutionary perspective, with manifestations claiming to put down De Gaulle’s government and questioning the moral values of the bourgeois society. The revolutionary conscience, expressed in the manifestations by the French young people back in 1968 reflected a period of worldwide revolutionary risings. This period was marked by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the workers’ strikes that shook the entire Europe, the des-colonization of Africa and by the northern Vietnamese TET offensive which pre- announced the defeat and expulsion of the Yankee army from Vietnam.
During the French May, the young people and the workers’ strengths were also reinforced by the existence of the USSR and the Eastern European Workers’ States. Even with their Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, the workers’ states served to the international proletarians as a strong ideological reference. The very existence of the workers’ states signified that the bourgeoisie had been expropriated in almost 1/3 of the planet. It also meant that in this part of the world, the workers had realized historical conquers never before achieved by the proletarians in any of the capitalist countries. The proletarian social conquests in the workers’ states, such as full employment, housing, free health care and education, eradication of illiteracy, elevation of the masses’ cultural level, obligated the capitalist countries’ bourgeoisie, afraid of a proletarian expropriation, to make considerable concessions to the workers.
However, at this time, the manifestations aroused by the young immigrant descendents, by the way, the most oppressed sector of the French working class, happen in a period of profound ideological retrocession opened since the fall of the USSR and the Eastern workers’ states. Even with the magnitude and radicalization of the today’s young insurgency, there is not a revolutionary perspective in these people’s ideological horizon.
With the end of the workers’ states, the bourgeoisie of the European capitalist countries felt free to break the so called “state of social well-being” by pushing down the working and living conditions of the working-class. In France, these attacks to the workers were started back during the France Communist Party (FCP) and the Socialist Party (SP) “pluralist left” government. Chirac’s government, even with the workers’ resistance, is deepening the offensive against the workers’ social conquests and intensifying the rhythms of working productivity with the intention to amplify the French monopolies’ profit. The most immediate result of this politics is the growth of unemployment which officially has passed the margin of 10%. It hurts especially the young French Arabic descendents.
The French proletarians are not inactive front to the destruction of its historical conquests. The workers’ strike of 1995 that had duration of 26 days, mobilized more than 3 millions workers in the entire country and, for a short period, stopped the government’s plans, was an important mark of the workers’ decisive resistance. However, even with the size of this striking movement, it was missing a revolutionary direction.
The young rebellion today’s manifestations showed that they need a revolutionary direction, but the workers’ movement tends to move backwards with their objectives and with their ways of fighting. The absence of a revolutionary ideological reference limits the rebellions toward the struggle against racism and violence promoted by the French CRS and police troop’s anti-motions. The only political claim proposed until now is the renounce of a neo-Nazi right wing politician, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is part of the French government. He is one of the most proponents of racism against immigrants, referring to them as “idles”, “scoria” or even as “Islamic radicals”.
Regarding the methods of fighting, it is clear that the differential between the manifestation of the May of 1968 and the young revolts of 2005 is that, even with its radicalizations, the last one does not express clear political objectives.
This is another reflex of the ideological emptiness that was opened with the destruction of the Workers’ States and with the revisionism proliferated in the majority of the lefty parties around the world. They embraced the defense of the bourgeois democracy, making the workers’ movement to shift backwards to the ways of fighting that were established at the beginning of the capitalism, such as the loudest movement at the end of the 18th Century. Back then, the workers destroyed the capitalist machines and property because they yet did not have developed advanced organizations and ways of fighting such as labor unions and strikes. Back then, they did not envisage a historical perspective of a socialist proletarian revolution. This perspective appeared later on with the development of the classes’ struggle in the 19th century.
The ideological retrocession, a product of the complete surrender of the revisionist Marxism and the absence of a true combatant revolutionary organization, manifested in the conscience of the French protestors, is a phenomenon equivalent to the growth of the Islamic fundamentalism influence. Because of the absence of revolutionary conscience and organizations, the Islamic fundamentalism occupies an important position among the Middle Eastern masses by militarily confronting the imperialism reactionary offensives in the region.
Even with the political limitations of these fights, the revolutionary task is have solidarity with the combaters, fighting to achieve the masses’ influence in order to direct them toward a revolutionary program.
However, the French “extreme” left, the pseudo-Trotskyists such as Lutte Ouvriere, PT, LCR, either not put themselves in the military camp of the fundamentalist organizations who participated in the 09/11 attacks or defend the Taliban military victory against the Yankee occupation troops in the Afghanistan. Even now, they do not put themselves on the side of the young insurgents, keeping them inert against the crisis. They just complain about the effects of the neoliberal politics and that way collaborating to maintain the backward level of the masses’ conscience.
Contrary to these revisionist groups who bend themselves to the imperialist media advertisement of the “war on terror”, the LBI puts itself indirectly in the insurgents’ site by making clear that the essential cause of the French young people’s revolt is Chirac’s government politics. These politics include privatizations, cut in the public expenses and by making the working market flexible. It causes unemployment that affects especially immigrant descendents young workers who are in their majority from Arabic origins. We also believe that the racist hate and provocations sent by the right neo-Nazi (Chirac/ Villepin/Sarkozy) against the immigrants have as an objective to poison the French proletarian with preconceptions in order to prevent the unity of the working class struggle against the capitalist exploitation.
Therefore, it is necessary to unify the young people’s insurgence with the workers’ strikes, proposing that way a powerful French proletarian general strike to defeat the compressing politics promoted by Chirac’s government. It is necessary to push the masses’ radicalization to a way in which it could reflect the vigor of a revolutionary program by pointing towards the destruction of the capitalism and the construction of the socialism as the only way to overcome the crisis.
Because of the absence of a proletarian vanguard party and because it was aborted by the Stalinist political of betraying, the intense revolutionary waves that shook France in May of 1968 could not conduct the proletarian revolution to a victory. It becomes necessary now more than ever for the proletarian conscientious vanguard to double its efforts in order to construct an authentic internationalist revolutionary party in the country. It is the unique instrument capable of taking the working class to perform a mortal offensive against the capitalists. With the destruction of the bourgeois capitalist state, they will open way to a new revolutionary phase in the world.
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