France:
Sarkozy’s defeat is our victory, but
there are bigger battles to come.
Hundreds of thousands were on the streets of Paris on
the night of Sunday 6th May to celebrate the fall of the monster, and they had
every reason to be happy about Sarkozy’s defeat. Champion of tax cuts for the
rich and public service cuts for the rest of us, his election campaign moved
further right every day in the desperate hope of attracting the votes which
went to the fascists in the first round. On the first of May he bussed in
supporters from all over France to be filmed in front of the Eiffel tower while
he demanded of trade unions “Put down your red flag, and serve France instead.”
So Sarkozy’s sacking is excellent news. If he had
been re-elected, his plans for cuts and other attacks would have been
accelerated many times over. He has already raised the retirement age and
savaged our schools. It would have been open season on Trade union rights and
workers’ conditions in general, and privatizations of pared-down public
services would have been the order of the day.
In addition, some of the policies proposed by
Hollande, first Socialist president for seventeen years, are very welcome - the
right to vote for immigrants at local elections, immediate withdrawal from
Afghanistan, gay marriage, more nursery school places and a women’s rights
ministry, to cite some examples. He is also proposing other modest reforms
which are in the interests of workers - higher taxes for the rich (up to 75%
for the filthy rich) and more social help for parents of school-age children.
His programme pledges him not to continue privatization of electricity or the
railways, to create 60 000 jobs in education, to limit rent rises, to defend
public sector health services and to renegotiate European-wide agreements which
impose ever harsher austerity policies. This week millions of immigrants are
feeling that the police will be less encouraged to give free rein to their
racism, and millions of workers are feeling that their pensions are less under
threat. Hollande’s first decrees will reduce his own salary by thirty per cent
and restore the right to retire at sixty to part of the workforce.
Reformist parties are contradictory animals: at the
same time, Hollande has been wanting to reassure the
more right-wing element of his electorate by insisting that there will be no
more residence papers for illegal immigrants asking for them than there were
under Sarkozy. And the Socialist Party, just like the right wing, has been
involved in islamophobic scaremongering of late.
Low Expectations
Expectations on Left governments are massively lower
than thirty years ago. No-one thinks that the lives of the 4.3 million
unemployed in France, or the standard of living of the 3.3 million minimum wage
workers will radically improve because of the new president. Hollande will keep
in place the neoliberal reforms of universities and public utilities and will
no doubt add more of his own. This is why the Socialist Party campaign didn’t
raise much popular enthusiasm, and the main thrust of Left sentiment was “at
least we’ll get rid of Sarkozy”.
Exactly how much the new president will do in the
workers’ interest will depend on the mobilizations of the working class and its
unions. Hollande insists he can improve social justice at the same time as
reducing the national debt, but, if and when the financial markets get even
greedier, his priority will always be to satisfy them first. At that point,
workers’ struggle is what will count, even to make Hollande keep the promises
he has made.
It is quite wrong to consider that reformist
governments today cannot deliver reforms. They do tend to deliver ever smaller
reforms in the workers’ interests and to donate ever more presents from public
funds to the bosses. But they still reflect class mobilization and can be
forced to hand over the goods. Ten years ago in France, a Socialist Party
government introduced the thirty-five hour week, and brought in healthcare
coverage for the poorest in society for the first time. Reforms are possible.
This is why The Economist magazine, outspoken voice of neoliberal
supporters of market dictatorship, is worried. “Mr. Hollande evinces a deep
anti-business attitude”, they write, “nothing [in his past] suggests that Mr.
Hollande is brave enough to rip up his manifesto and change France.” The
Economist does not trust Hollande to decisively fight for the bosses. But
they go on to outline what they think the future of France could be made of:
“The response of the markets could be brutal.” “Do not conclude”, they squeal,
“that Mr Hollande will impose tough reforms and demanding sacrifices on an
unwilling public without having his own arm twisted” by the bond markets.
In a vain attempt to “reassure the markets” it has been Left governments
in Spain and in Greece who have introduced vicious austerity programmes. If
push comes to shove, Hollande will be prepared to do the same. This is why the
key element today is the building of working class confidence, organization and
consciousness.
Polarization to the Left and to the Right
The deepening social crisis has led to a political
polarization which is the essential feature of French politics today and which
determines what anticapitalist activists need to be doing. Four million people
voted for the Left Front, headed up by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Their dynamic
campaign (several meetings of over a hundred thousand) put radical class
demands back in the forefront of politics, and made a priority of denouncing
the fascist Front National. Mélenchon called for the imposition of a ceiling on
boss’s salaries, the return of retirement at sixty for all and a large increase
in the minimum wage. “Let’s put finance back in its place” was one of the
slogans, and many thousands of trade unionists and former left activists of all
sorts joined in a tremendously exciting campaign.
During the two weeks between the first and second
round, Mélenchon and his activists pulled out all the stops to make sure that
Sarkozy suffered the heaviest defeat possible. Mélenchon in his meetings called
for a new June 1936 (when two million strikers won important victories,
including paid holidays for all), and laughed at the idea of joining a
Socialist Party government as a minister. “If the Socialist party is saying of
its programme ‘take it or leave it’, we’ll leave it!” he declared. The Front de
Gauche, set up as an electoral coalition between the
Communist Party, the Left Party and some smaller revolutionary or Red/Green
groups seems to be becoming a new activist force in its own right. This is an
excellent thing, in particular if antifascist campaigning is brought to the
fore in a way it hasn’t been for the last ten years.
Not that the Left Front doesn’t have faults.
Mélenchon’s calls for “a citizens’ revolution” and “a revolution through the
ballot box” suffer of course from the difficulty that the world doesn’t work
like that. But it is in the struggle that this can be clarified. It would be
wonderful if there were millions of revolutionaries in France today, but there
aren’t. What is new now is that there are millions of people who believe
radical reform is possible to advance workers’ living conditions and standard
of living, and who are prepared to fight for it.
The Left Front is also not good on islamophobia.
Mélenchon loudly denounced the NPA a few years back, when one of the NPA
electoral candidates was a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf. Things may be
getting better - he denounced the victimisation of Muslims several times during
the campaign, and another leader of the Left Front condemned the instrumentalisation of feminist ideas by islamophobes. Still, a major re-think on anti-Muslim racism
is required.
There is everything to fight for in the Left Front.
One of its biggest member parties, the Communist Party, has frequently been
much more interested in running local and regional councils, often passing on
government austerity measures, than in class struggle. And Mélenchon’s left
nationalist nonsense is a problem. There is no guarantee that the class
struggle current will maintain the upper hand, and there may even be pressures
for the Left Front to join a Socialist Party government after the legislatives.
But the rise of this dynamic movement is the best opportunity for decades to
offer the radical fighting Left alternative which is so sorely needed.
Revamped fascists
The other side of the polarization is the far right. The
revamped fascist National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, got 6.4 million votes in
the first round, the highest score in their history. On the ground, it has not
yet been able to rebuild an activist organization as strong as the one it had
in the late 1990s before antifascist activity put it under so much pressure
that it split in two. But it is now recruiting again and there is no time to
waste: a national, very broadly based, active antifascist organization is
urgently needed. In the last thirty years the biggest antiracist and
antifascist organizations in France have tended to fall into one or other
mistake - either very broad but purely moralistic antiracist organizations
which don’t try to stop the fascists organizing, or smallish networks based on
purely physical opposition to the fascists or on “red antifascism,” which you
can only join in if you have read half of Trotsky’s writings.
Anticapitalists gotta
relate!
The main task for revolutionaries in France today is
how to relate to the activists of the Left Front. One option is to
ignore them because some of their ideas are confused or involve illusions in
the possibilities of constitutional action. This is a disastrous mistake. What
is needed is to get stuck in alongside them, not just in individual campaigns
and strikes but also in a political and electoral bloc which, independent from
the Socialist Party, fights to build class combativity
and consciousness. Mélenchon has said he would welcome a broadening of the Left
Front to include revolutionary organizations who want to join the alliance
while maintaining their autonomy.
The strongest openly revolutionary organization in
France, the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste),
which is always in there doing the legwork on rank and file campaigns and
strikes, had a dreadful presidential campaign, concentrating on the fact that
the candidate was “not a professional politician” but a manual worker, and
having nothing specific to say to the millions attracted by the Left Front.
When Mélenchon had over a hundred thousand at a meeting, there were no NPA
leafletters or paper-sellers to be seen! But in a crisis as deep as today’s,
workers under attack don’t care whether the candidate is straight from the
factory or not! The NPA came over as sectarian, and out-of-touch, and its score
dropped from 4% in the previous presidentials to
1.15% this time round. Once the first round results came through, the
party made a call to vote against Sarkozy in the second round, and then seemed
to close down for holidays. Meanwhile the Left Front was holding mass meetings
calling for the heaviest possible defeat of Sarkozy, and for the building of
the resistance, reminding Hollande of some of his positive promises, and of the
Left Front’s demands which have to be fought for, against Hollande if
necessary. The NPA paper simply commented that the success of the Left Front
“can be seen as something positive, but we must bear in mind
the limits of Mélenchon’s programme.”
As a result of all this, the NPA’s crisis has
deepened and a sizeable minority current within it, the Gauche Anticapitaliste,
will no doubt leave the NPA and join the Left Front, while maintaining
political independence. This newish grouping will be heterogeneous, but
promising, I think.
There will be legislative elections in June which the
Socialist Party is most likely to win. The new Socialist government will come
under attack at once from the financial markets, and will be immediately put to
the test. The Left Front will be put to the test too: we will see if it can
take a major role in organizing resistance to Socialist party austerity
policies. These are exciting times: revolutionaries must be in the thick of the
reconstruction, fighting, organizing and explaining, and not heckling from the
sidelines.
John Mullen
John Mullen is a member of the NPA in the Paris area.
His blog is here: http://johnmullenagen.blogspot.fr/