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WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : France
The French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire defends its opportunism
By David Walsh in Paris
10 June 2002
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Many people and organizations claiming to be “revolutionary,” are, in fact, nothing of
the kind. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire [LCR—Revolutionary Communist
League] of France is an organization specializing in a brand of “left” demagogy that is
devoid of content. In reality, it is a deeply opportunistic organization, taking up a
position on the left flank of the French political establishment.
The response of the LCR to the first round of the presidential election April 21
represented a turning point in the history of the organization. The party’s candidate,
Olivier Besancenot, received 1.2 million votes in the balloting, 4.25 percent of the
national total, in a fragmented race in which the leading vote-getter, the incumbent
president, Jacques Chirac, received only 5.7 million votes. Never before had the LCR
received such support at the ballot box.
Much to the surprise of the political pundits, the first round results produced a
run-off
between the right-wing Gaullist Chirac and the extreme right candidate, Jean-Marie
Le Pen of the National Front. The candidate of the parliamentary left, then-Prime
Minister Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party, finished third and was excluded from the
run-off election. The response of the French bourgeois political apparatus, both its
right and left wing, including the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, was to
launch a concerted campaign for a vote for Chirac.
Demonstrating that it took seriously neither itself, nor its more than one million
voters, nor political principle, the LCR threw in its lot with the officially sponsored
campaign for the incumbent president. The party, headed by Alain Krivine, demurred
from openly calling for a Chirac vote. Instead it appealed to its supporters to “vote
against Le Pen” in the two-man race. It is not clear whom this was supposed to fool.
It did not fool the LCR’s presidential candidate, Besancenot, who publicly declared in
advance of the second round that he was voting for Chirac.
This “revolutionary” and “communist” organization effectively called on workers and
youth to give their political support to the chosen representative of French big
business. The LCR as a result has assumed political responsibility, whether or not it
acknowledges it, for the measures carried out by the Chirac government—not only its
attacks on the social programs and living standards of French workers, but also its
actions in defense of French imperialist interests throughout the world.
>From the point of view of Krivine and the rest of the LCR leadership, there was little
choice after April 21. To have resisted the pro-Chirac camp would have brought them
into open conflict with the middle class protest movements and Stalinist trade union
officials to which they are oriented. It would, moreover, have brought the crisis
within
their own ranks to the point of a split. Such is the outcome of the protracted
political
decay of this organization.
The LCR is perhaps the most perfected model of the Pabloite party. Pabloism is a
tendency that emerged in the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s. It represented
the repudiation of the struggle to build an international party of social revolution,
which the Pabloites had come to consider a futile task. Instead it sought to reduce
the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, to the role of adviser and
“left” critic of the Stalinist and social democratic labor bureaucracies and the petty
bourgeois nationalist movements in the colonial and semi- colonial countries. The
French LCR, under the tutelage of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank,
Krivine and others, has been pursuing this liquidationist course for half a century.
Opportunism has distorted and perverted parties and individuals beyond recognition
in far less time.
In the campaign for the legislative elections, the first round of which takes place
June
9, the LCR is running in 412 constituencies under the banner “LCR—100 percent à
gauche” (LCR—100 percent left). In several dozen other areas it is supporting
campaigns by various regional “left” coalitions. In all, it is presenting or supporting
candidates in 450 out of the 577 constituencies, covering some 80 percent of the
French electorate. This is a considerably larger campaign than the LCR organized in
1997, when it fielded 130 candidates.
The thrust of the LCR’s campaign is that there are now two “lefts” in France: the
official, parliamentary left of the Socialist Party and its coalition partners (the
Communist Party, Greens, Left Radicals) and the left “from below,” the “radical” left,
the left that is “clearly against the right and the extreme right.” The LCR includes
itself in the latter camp.
The ten-point program of the LCR calls for a law banning layoffs; the defense of
public services; an increase in the minimum wage and social benefits; the
legalization of marijuana; equal rights for women; an end to discrimination against
homosexuals; full pensions at 60; the introduction of pro-ecology policies; and the
rejection of all “anti-social measures” introduced by the European Union.
It is difficult to distinguish between the programs of the LCR, Lutte Ouvrière, the
Communist Party and even sections of the Socialist Party. They all read like reformist
wish lists. There is no serious attention paid in the LCR program to the state of
French society, the growing social polarization and political alienation of wide layers
of the population, the criminal betrayals of the Socialist and Communist parties, the
crisis of perspective and leadership in the working class, or the need for the
socialist
transformation of society.
The LCR distinguishes itself as the party of “mobilizations,” i.e., protests and
demonstrations. Its conception of a political struggle is reduced to that of the
“permanent mobilization,” as Besancenot has expressed it. The notion that a Marxist
party must fight under all conditions against the prevailing reformist consciousness of
the working masses for a socialist program is entirely foreign to the inveterate
opportunists of the LCR.
LCR meeting in Paris
Some of these issues assumed very concrete form in the course of an election
meeting held June 5 by the LCR in the Paris constituency in which Besancenot stood
as the party’s candidate.
The meeting was opened by Béatrice Bonneau, also an LCR candidate, who made a
few general remarks about a program that “will really change things.” Sandra
Demarq, running for suppléant [alternate] with Besancenot, then read out the LCR
program.
The floor was given over to Besancenot, who spoke of the “two possible lefts.” The
Socialists, CP and Greens think that capitalism is “unsurpassable.” The fight against
the National Front “has only begun.” He noted that the governmental left had not
understood anything from the presidential election nor why they were cut off from the
working population and the youth. He described the conditions in the local area and
emphasized that working people had “gained nothing” from the left or the right.
In conversation [see “An interview with Olivier Besancenot, candidate of the Ligue
Communiste Révolutionnaire”] Besancenot, 27, is a perfectly amiable person, without
pretensions. However, as his remarks to the June 5 meeting indicated, he has an
extremely limited grasp of political questions. He becomes, willingly or not, one of
the
means by which the opportunism of the LCR’s hardened Pabloite leadership is
transmitted into the working class.
At the June 5 meeting, the discussion that followed the opening reports was
deliberately restricted by the LCR cadre to the most immediate questions: issues
involved with the public service, the fate of this or that postal facility, etc. This
under
conditions, according to their own propaganda, of political crisis, the emergence of a
fascist threat and the need for desperate social measures. One must always keep in
mind when dealing with the LCR: this is an organization that does not take its own
name, program or breathless rhetoric—in short, anything about itself—seriously.
Not surprisingly, the vapid exchange of questions and answers produced a general
mood of somnolence in the hall. At this point Ulrich Rippert of the World Socialist
Web Site and German Socialist Equality Party [Partei für Soziale Gleichheit]
intervened in the discussion. He noted that the French elections had an international
significance and that they had raised fundamental political issues. In considering why
the right wing had made serious gains and how it could be fought, Rippert pointed to
the lessons of history: that fascism cannot be stopped by elections or alliances with
this or that section of the bourgeoisie. “The struggle against fascist organizations,”
he
stated, “requires the political mobilization of the working class as an independent
social force on the basis of a socialist program.”
He pointed to the example of the German Social Democrats who, in 1932, “called for
a vote for General Hindenburg. Only a few months after Hindenburg was elected
president—with the votes of many workers—he appointed Hitler to the post of
chancellor.”
Rippert pointed to the LCR’s position in the previous month’s French presidential
election—de facto support for Chirac—and commented, “This has weakened the
workers and created unfavorable conditions for a struggle against Chirac and against
a potential right-wing government. My question is: Why didn’t the LCR call for a
boycott of the elections? Why didn’t the LCR say that there was only a choice
between two right-wing bourgeois politicians and that the working class should not
give any support to either of them?”
In responding to Rippert, Besancenot defended the LCR line on the grounds, first,
that it had organized independently of the main bourgeois camp. “We were among
the first to call people onto the streets, that is, to carry out a campaign of
action,” he
asserted.
Second, he indicated that the LCR’s aim was to block “the far right both in the streets
and in the elections [at the ballot box].” He admitted that this had “generated a
debate amongst us, and we never hid it ... In our organization, there are those who
thought that we had to call clearly for a vote for Chirac. Against that, there were
those
who thought it was wrong to call for a vote against Le Pen. The majority position was
what I said. Very sincerely, it is an important issue, I agree with you. But, look,
it’s not
the issue of the century.”
He continued: “But about your position on an active boycott, I think that nobody in our
organization would have had that position. Because for our part, we don’t put Chirac
and Le Pen in the same basket. Because there is a difference, all the same, between
someone who would sing the praises of national socialism in a Greek weekly
newspaper last week [Le Pen], and a right-winger who is a racist and hasn’t ever
been able to stand immigrants [Chirac], but someone who, when he gets into power,
will not necessarily attack the entire workers’ movement, the whole social movement.
The problem is, the day Le Pen takes over we will not be able to have the very
discussion we are having right now, while we can still have it today under Jacques
Chirac.”
These comments are quite revealing.
First, Besancenot fails to see that if the right-wing parties did not mobilize “in the
streets” for Chirac and against Le Pen, it was largely because they did not need to.
The so-called left, including sections of the “far left,” was doing it for them. The
Chirac camp was able to lay back, avoid a political confrontation with the National
Front and its supporters, and prepare for future collaboration with the neo-fascist
right.
The admission that there were those in the LCR who openly supported a call to vote
for Chirac is also significant, although it hardly comes as a surprise, given the fact
that Besancenot was among them.
To Besancenot’s comment that this is not, in any case, such a pressing matter, one
can only respond: if the means by which one defends the democratic rights of the
working class and fights the threat of fascism is not one of the “issues of the
century,” what might those be?
The LCR candidate’s remarks on the political physiognomy and relations of Le Pen
and Chirac are also significant. The starting point for the World Socialist Web Site
editorial board’s call for the LCR, Lutte Ouvrière and Parti des Travailleurs to
organize a boycott of the second round of the presidential election [See “No to Chirac
and Le Pen! For a working class boycott of the French election”] was not that there
were no differences between Chirac and Le Pen. That would be vulgar radicalism.
There are differences between Le Pen and Chirac, between Chirac and François
Bayrou of the UDF, between Bayrou and Alain Madelin of the Liberal Democrats, for
that matter, between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret of the MNR (another ultra-right
party). In some cases these differences are substantial, and the working class is
obliged to understand them. But in the end, the differences are relative, since all of
these parties and candidates defend French capitalism, and, should the capitalist
system face a direct threat from the working class, they would unite behind any
measures, including those of fascist dictatorship, deemed necessary by French
capital to defend its rule.
The starting point for socialists is not the differences, large or small, between rival
factions of the ruling elite or its petty bourgeois agents, but the need to establish
the
political independence of the working class from the entire bourgeois set-up. As
history has demonstrated again and again, mostly in the form of tragic defeats of the
working class, this is the only viable means to defend the democratic rights of the
working class from the danger of dictatorship and fascism. Wherever the working
class has been subordinated to the liberal or “democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie in
the name of the struggle against fascism—as in Germany in 1931-33 and the
“popular front” in France of the mid- and late 1930s, the result has been the defeat of
the working class and the triumph of fascist reaction.
Belying the LCR’s much repeated insistence that Chirac does not represent a
“rampart” against fascism, Besancenot’s responses at the meeting revealed a
touching and complacent faith in the French president. He also exhibited the political
fatalism that lies behind the LCR’s ceaseless agitation for protest and action “in the
streets.”
For all of the LCR’s claims that it organized independently of the right and the
official
left, it is inevitably obliged to fall back on the same arguments as the Socialist and
Communist parties, although in slightly more obscure and hypocritical “left” terms: it
turns out, after all, that Chirac is a defender of “Republican values,” who can be
relied upon not to attack the rights of left movements and “not necessarily ... the
entire workers’ movement, the whole social movement.”
Besancenot exposed, in his own words, the political fact that the LCR is prostrate
before the French ruling elite and bourgeois public opinion.
After Rippert spoke at the meeting, one LCR member could be heard saying to
another, “I’m glad I arrived in time for the interesting part.” She spoke too soon. As
soon as Besancenot made his response, leading LCR members intervened to bring
the discussion back to its previous subject: the state of French public
services—considered entirely apart from the political means by which they were to be
defended. Members and supporters of the organization had at all costs to be spared
a serious political discussion.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
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