Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Worker, No. 90, 28 September 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE WORD “OCTOBRE” has started to appear on the walls of Paris in bright red paint.
French students at the turbulent communist youth festival in Sofia this summer held “strategy” talks with their German opposite numbers and other revolutionary groups. They seemed certain that “something” will happen in France in October.
If “something” does take place, it can only be an attempt to finish the revolution started last May, in spite of the stranglehold that the Communist Party has on the French working class.
Revolutionary activity is more difficult in France than in West Germany or Britain. Even before May, the Communist Party (PCF) was a much more effective policeman of the French working class than similar Labour or communist parties in other countries.
The official police are already active. In the Latin Quarter, the unofficial headquarters of the revolutionary socialist groups, the brutal riot police, the CRS, are arresting 60 people a night as a routine affair.
Coachloads of CRS occupy the campuses of the universities at the Sorbonne and Nanterre. The cops are kept well lubricated by crates of expensive German beer – paid for by the taxpayer.
But in spite of the police intimidation, the May events have given the Left strength and destroyed illusions that change could be won through parliament. The continuing hostility of the state towards the Left and the working class has helped to steel the socialist movement.
French students and workers realise they are no longer playing games with the Sorbonne authorities or with CGT officials. They are openly facing the aggression of the state, including provocateurs from the secret police and the hefty boots and weapons of the CRS.
The banning of the socialist organisations last summer was an attempt by the authorities to drive four main groups underground: the Trotskyist Workers’ Voice group, the Young Communist Revolutionaries (JCR), the Maoists and the anarchist Movement of 22 March. But in fact the ban has given the groups great encouragement.
Some of the jailed revolutionary leaders are being released, usually on conditional discharge. Alain Krivine of the JCR was released on August 25 and he immediately issued a statement denouncing the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Many socialist students have been working in factories during the summer and have set up a number of industrial workers’ groups. Other students have worked for newspaper distributors, selling official papers along the boulevards but getting rid of revolutionary leaflets and papers to sympathetic customers.
The main reading of undergraduates and workers is the seditious leaflet or the newly-translated work of Rosa Luxembourg and Trotsky.
But most of the debate on the Left is about the May events rather than the possibilities of a new upsurge in October. Sadly, divisions between different organisations have widened.
In spite of the call from Workers’ Voice (before it was banned) for talks about the reorganisation and unity of the Left, the groups have failed to come to any agreement. Each group seems more concerned to “prove” the correctness of its policy in May than to examine why the revolution failed.
It is hard to see any of these groups being flexible enough to play a role in the next spontaneous outburst of working-class struggle. What is needed is an organisation that can channel such an outburst away from purely trade union demands (more money, better conditions) towards a real struggle for workers’ power.
There are some hopeful signs. A new paper has appeared since June called Workers’ Fight. It calls for workers’ councils in factories to plan future activity and to bypass the communist-led trade union, the GGT, and the other union bureaucracies.
The workers’ councils aim to link up with the revolutionary committees that already exist in the universities and high schools. This is an important strategy – but it is the only one that has appeared in an effort to maintain the impetus of the May events.
For the rest of the French Left, the crying need to coordinate workers in struggle in a single revolutionary organisation and to link that organisation with the students, is accepted but not put into operation.
It is a challenge that must be taken up if the next outburst by the workers is to lead on to victory and not defeat.
Main Socialist Worker Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 30 October 2020