Jacques Morand, 1938-2015

Submitted by AWL on 19 May, 2015 - 6:27 Author: Martin Thomas

Jean-Claude Kerjouan, known in his political activity as Jacques Morand or Illy, died on 10 May, at the age of 77. He was a leader of the L’Etincelle group in France, with which AWL have collaborated for many years.

L’Etincelle is now a group within the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party), but was previously, from the early 1990s until it was expelled in 2008, a faction in another large French revolutionary socialist group, Lutte Ouvriere (LO).

As far as we can see Lutte Ouvriere has published no tribute to Morand. Yet for many decades he was a leader of LO. He joined in 1956, as a high-school student, and by the time we came to know LO fairly well, in the 1970s, he was one of its three prominent speakers and writers, with Francois Duburg and Georges Kaldy. LO’s other main leader, Raymond Barcia, known as Hardy, who died in 2009, was more reclusive.

We had known a bit about LO (or Voix Ouvriere, as it was called before 1968) since 1967, from a former LO member active in Britain for a while. We learned about the skill and precision it had developed in the production of workplace bulletins, combining workplace news with socialist politics. LO continues to produce many such bulletins, and so does L’Etincelle. AWL produce some on a similar model, trying to learn from LO’s work.

We have also tried to learn from the systematic and meticulous way in which LO discusses with and educates contacts, and integrates new members.

In the mid-70s LO organised a series of international discussion conferences open to all Trotskyists. After a while, though the conferences were still open, the only people coming were LO, its small sister groups elsewhere, and us.

We had a period of more intensive discussion with LO. As part of that I went to work with LO in Paris for some months. Both LO and we concluded, after a while, that our differences made closer links impossible.

LO’s style has always been dour, but Morand often added a twist of humour or inquiry to the message. In their tribute L’Etincelle’s US comrades, “Speak Out Now”, recall “his curiosity, his interest in others, his kindness to all and his sense of humour”.

Maybe it was that talent for looking at things aslant which led him to separate off from the rest of the LO leadership. In the early 1990s he and a few other central LO activists observed that Russia, after the collapse of the Stalinist regime in 1991, was mutating to capitalism.

LO’s established doctrine was that the other Stalinist states were bourgeois states (because there had been no workers’ revolution), but the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state. We always thought this view was incoherent, and a quirk explicable only from a quirk of LO’s history. LO was the continuation of a group which was active from 1939 to about 1948 (at which date most Trotskyists still balked at calling the East European regimes workers’ states) and lapsed for some years. It was revived in 1956, and made it a rule to avoid theoretical innovation.

Incoherent or not, the doctrine saved LO from the illusions about revolutionary Stalinism which afflicted other Trotskyists. After 1991, however, some theoretical innovation or other was necessary. The other LO leaders did not think so. They condemned the perception of a mutation to capitalism in Russia as premature. Morand and his co-thinkers were pitched into being, not just comrades with a different view, but a faction. They also came to differ from the majority in advocating more open, unity-seeking, experimental tactics.

We were able to discuss with them repeatedly from about 1997. I remember one discussion with Morand in which I put it to him that if Russia between 1917 and 1991 had regressed from workers’ power to capitalist rule, then it made no sense to see the decisive setback as in 1991. It must be located in the late 1920s. Morand agreed tentatively that “one might say” that the USSR had been state capitalist as far back as the 1930s.

Like every discussion with Morand, it was bracing, thought-provoking, memorable. We mourn the loss to the movement from his death, and send our condolences to his comrades and friends.

• Obituary from Convergences Révolutionnaires

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