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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 52, 3 December 1938, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Military-fascist dictatorship or the workers’ power – this is the choice that lies before the French working class at this critical hour.
This is the choice that has been on the order of the day through four years of deepening economic crisis and repeated convulsions.
French capitalism has been in a permanent state of acute crisis since 1933. Already rotting in decline when the full impact of the world crisis finally hit it, French capitalism has been able to offer even less resistance to the ravages of the crisis than Britain and the United States.
National production has declined disastrously. The French peasant has been squeezed until he has all but suffocated. The arms race accelerated with the approach of a new war has swollen the needs of the state to the point where they now absorb nearly half the greatly-reduced national income.
Ever since 1934 it has been made clear that the French ruling class was preparing to free itself from the restraints of parliamentary institutions and the unions of the workers – luxuries it could no longer afford.
Beginning in 1933 it organized and armed its bands of Fascist thugs – the largest of them was Col. de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu – and on Feb. 6, 1934 it sent them out into the streets for the first armed demonstration which heralded the end of bourgeois democracy in France. Shaken with fright, the then premier Daladier – the same who now leads the struggle against the workers- – surrendered the reins of government and gave way to the extra-parliamentary government of Gaston Doumergue.
The Doumergue government was the first of a series of Bonapartist regimes – so-called because they present themselves as arbiters between the classes, basing themselves not on the parliamentary machinery but upon the military-police apparatus of the State. Such were the governments of Bruening, von Schleicher, and Von Papen, which paved the way for Hitlerism in Germany.
The spectacular rise and growth of the armed Fascist gangs, aided and almost openly armed and abetted by the General Staff of the army, followed closely upon the staggering lesson given to the workers by the defeat of their fellow-workers at the hands of Hitler in Germany. Only a few weeks after the Feb. 6th riots, in Austria, the same bitter lesson was repeated when the cannon of Dollfuss battered in the last hastily defended strongholds of the Austrian workers.
Within the French working class a powerful groundswell soon made itself felt. The workers pressed forward, anxious for the struggle and acutely aware that failure to challenge the Fascist threat meant the regime of the club and gun, of castor oil and the concentration camp.
In the French Socialist Party this stirring within the masses had the effect of swinging the hidebound bureaucracy of the party to the Left. Simultaneously the French Communist Party was beginning its own swing to the Right. From 1929 to 1933 the French Communists had been shouting wildly for conquest of the streets, for the workers’ power. When that period of comparative stability was rudely ended, by the crisis, by the victory of Hitler, and by the rise of the Fascists as demonstrated on Feb. 6, 1934, they retreated In fright from their play-acting revolutionism. In other words they shouted for revolution when the workers were not ready and abandoned the revolution precisely when the workers began dimly to reach out for it.
The will of the workers to struggle against the Fascist threat was so imperative, that the union bureaucrats were forced to act. As during this week, they sought to canalize the fury of the workers into peaceful channels and called for a 24-hour general strike on Feb. 12, 1934, as a demonstration of protest. The workers, who had been indifferent to the struggle for partial demands that could no longer be met, poured out into the streets in millions in a tremendous display of their readiness to struggle for the conquest of power that a general strike so clearly implies.
This same pressure brought about the positive result of a united front between the Socialist and Communist Parties. This united front, however, remained on paper and offered no program of action to the workers. Throughout 1934 the French Bolshevik-Leninists (Fourth International) who had entered the Socialist Party to help the crystallization of its left wing, agitated unceasingly for the creation of workers’ defense militia against the Fascist bands, for the revolutionary general strike against the Bonapartist governments, and for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
The pressure from below became so strong that in January 1935 the Socialist Party leadership actually offered to the Communist Party a proposal to wage a joint struggle on the basis of the conquest of power. But the Communist Party was attuned not to the needs and interests of the French workers but to the dictates of the Kremlin. Stalin, whose rejection of the united front had helped Hitler to power in Germany and who subsequently was rebuffed in his efforts to make a new deal with the Fuehrer, had begun to turn toward France. The Franco-Soviet pact was in the making. The Soviet Union entered the League of Nations. The Kremlin bureaucracy became the chief prop of the status quo in Europe and its hireling Communist parties were ordered to act accordingly. In France especially, the bourgeoisie had to be reassured. It had to be freed from fear of any workers’ revolution.
The French masses, as various elections showed, were turning away from the Radical Socialists, the traditional party of the French petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie was clearly undergoing a process of polarization to the left toward the workers, and to the right, toward the Fascists. By a bold revolutionary policy and a program that showed the petty bourgeoisie a way out of the economic impasse – a new way out in socialized production for the shopkeepers, small merchants, peasants and peasant artisans of France – the working class parties could have atomized the Fascist threat and won the masses to the banner of the revolution.
But the Communist Party, rapidly becoming transformed into the most reactionary brake on the working class, wanted none of this. Leon Blum, Paul Faure, and the other Socialist bureaucrats, forced leftward by the workers’ pressure, were delighted to find that the Communists had no intention of taking the January program for conquest of power very seriously. Much to their relief, the Communist Party demurred, saying “there is no revolutionary situation.”
The Socialists, who had always allied with the Radicals, had been forced from below to break with their own right-wing section that represented that traditional policy of alliance, known as the cartel. Instead of helping this process along, the Communist Party bureaucrats worked might and main to reconstruct the cartel, adding themselves to it, and to rehabilitate the Radical Socialist Party in the eyes of the masses.
The result was the emasculation of the workers’ united front and the creation in July, 1935, of the People’s Front, the unity of the working class parties with the bourgeois betrayers, with the same agents, Daladier & Co. who had so ignominiously capitulated to the Fascists in 1934. Ultra-Patriots
With the signature of the Franco-Soviet pact in May 1935 and Stalin’s declaration that he “understood and approved” the French program of national defense, the Communist, or more properly, the Stalinist party, was swiftly converted into an ultra-patriotic party which abandoned the anti-militarist struggle, the fight against the two-year term of military service, and did everything in its power to head off the militancy of the workers.
While they temporized and looked to the Bonapartist governments of Laval, Sarraut & Co. to disarm the Fascist gangs, they prevented the workers from organizing themselves for the direct armed struggle which the Fascists threatened to unleash. The gangs of De La Rocque were kept in leash meanwhile by French finance capital while the People’s Front was given its chance to behead and disorient the workers’ struggle.
In the summer of 1935 the real temper of the workers was shown repeatedly when they clashed with the armed forces of the State in explosions at Brest and Toulon. Strikes grew swiftly into actual challenges of the state power. These clashes revealed the basic conflict that was taking shape within the body of French capitalist society and the path the workers had to take if the Fascist threat was to be beaten down. But the whole propaganda of the People’s Front was pointed in the opposite direction.
The workers were told that the election of the People’s Front Was the thing. This was the epoch when the main slogan was “Daladier to power!” The elections of May 1936 astounded even the bureaucrats. The great leftward surge of the masses was expressed at the ballot boxes in an overwhelming victory for the Left parties, with the petty bourgeois Radicals picking up the plums saved for them by the People’s Front combination. Contrary to all expectations, the Socialists, not the Radicals, became the largest party in the chamber. The Communist Party, still regarded by the mass of workers as the party of the revolution, had its representation jumped from 10 to 72. Leon Blum was reluctantly compelled to take the helm instead of Daladier.
But meanwhile the workers, flushed with a sense of victory, swept out of the field of parliamentary dalliance into the field of open struggle. At the end of May, 1936, sitdown strikes began in the automobile, steel, and aviation plants around Paris. No union bureaucrats ordered the strikes. They just began. It was spontaneous combustion, ignited out of the materials of the revolutionary situation itself.
While the union bureaucrats, headed by Jouhaux, and the Socialist and Communist Party leaders, Blum, Faure, Cachin, Thorez, and the others, worked might and main to get out in front in order to head off the movement, the strikes spread from one end of the land to the other. It was a mass sitdown. All French industry was paralyzed. Over factories, forges, railway stations, department stores, and even insurance company offices, the red flag was run up. The revolution was on the order of the day. The Fascists and their capitalist masters were in full retreat.
But the People’s Front hastened to their rescue. Blum and his friends hastily drafted sweeping social legislation for collective contracts, the 5-day, 40-hour week, paid vacations, which were rushed through a badly frightened parliament. Most of the bills were adopted unanimously, even the extreme Right recognizing that only Blum & Co. could now save the capitalist order.
With these bright promises, by cajoling and wheedling, temporizing, and persuading, Blum, Cachin, Thorez & Co. succeeded in terminating the strikes and saving French capitalism.
During the next two years the People’s Front played out its role to the end as strikebreaker-in-chief on behalf of French finance capital. All its brightly-painted reforms turned out to be phoneys. It claimed to “democratize” the Bank of France and even provided the spectacle of Jouhaux, the trade union leader, as a member of the board of directors!
Meanwhile it served the real masters of the Bank of France and the Bank of England by taking the leading role in strangling the Spanish revolution fighting for its life just across its own borders! Blum of the People’s Front initiated the cruel farce of the “Non-intervention Committee” and the Stalinists went right along with it, while verbally protesting their solidarity with the Spanish workers. The workers’ militancy was scattered on the winds of parliamentary illusions. The People’s Front government savagely shot down and imprisoned opponents of French imperialism in the French colonies and in every other way carried out the orders of its bourgeois masters.
The workers were told that the People’s Front had ended the threat of Fascism because it passed laws dissolving the Fascist gangs. But the Croix de Feu simply changed its name to the French Social Party and continued its preparations under the protection and patronage of the General Staff, left intact, of course, by the Blum regime.
Blum’s government lasted a year, just long enough in the opinion of the finance capital masters of France, to make it possible for a new capitalist offensive to begin – for the crisis was pressing in and the workers had to be made to pay for it. Blum was replaced by Chautemps, and Chautemps in his turn by Daladier and it was Daladier, as People’s Front premier, who kicked the People’s Front downstairs and embarked openly on the road to Fascism.
Considering that the workers were sufficiently demoralized to leave the road open for a new offensive, Daladier was commissioned to launch it. French capital, faced by the aggressive advance of its totalitarian rivals, snatched at the Munich accord for the respite it offered, abandoned the Franco-Soviet pact as useless, and now seeks the way of revitalizing its own sapped strength to meet the tests that are yet to come. For this it could no longer use the People’s Front, for the workers now have to be not merely fooled but beaten into submission. This is the meaning of the Daladier decrees as the first open step toward an outright dictatorship.
But perhaps these gentry have miscalculated. The strikes of the past week, breaking once more without so much as a “by-your-leave” nod in the direction of the union bureaucrats, show that the vitality of the French workers has not been sapped, that the will and ability to struggle is still there despite the debilitating effect of four years of betrayal by Daladier, Blum, Thorez & Co.
The party of the Fourth International in France, the P.O.I. (Workers’ Internationalist Party), has identified itself through this period with the program of struggle, of armed resistance to Fascism, of the general strike for power, of the workers’ and peasants’ government. That party must now place itself in the front ranks of the struggle now unfolding and there join with all other revolutionary militants in creating a new leadership for the critical days ahead, for the issue is Fascism or a workers’ France. There is no third road.
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