A delegation from Workers' Liberty and Solidarity attended the annual fete of the French Trotskyist organisation Lutte Ouvriere on 26-28 May.
This fete, a tradition for over 30 years now, attracts around 20,000 people each year - somewhat fewer this year on account of almost continuous rain. It is held in large grounds about half-an-hour from Paris, with some 200 stalls offering food, drink, games, and information, plus music, dancing, and forums for political debate.
LO offers stall space to any revolutionary group that asks for it, and this year, as every year for a long time past, Workers' Liberty ran a stall. The number of stalls from political groups has diminished sharply in recent years, with the general slowing-down of the European left, but there are still enough to make the fete an important meeting-point for revolutionaries from across Europe.
Here are some notes on discussions at the fete. I have posted separately notes on information I gained about what's happening on the left in Italy.
LO-LCR debate
The French activist left is markedly more committed to open debate than the British. Each year there is at least one open debate at the Lutte Ouvriere fete between LO and the other big Trotskyist organisation in France, the LCR.
Presumably by common agreement, for some years now these debates have been handled not by veteran leaders of the two groupings (as they used to be) but by young activists (most, apparently, in their 20s).
This year, unusually, I thought the LCR speakers wiped the floor with the LO speakers, not only being far more fluent as speakers (LCR is surely a better school for political debate than LO) but making more sense.
The LCR is buoyant. Despite a general squeeze on the activist left in this year's presidential elections, its candidate, Olivier Besancenot, increased his vote. Activists from the left-wing minority of the LCR, Democratie Revolutionnaire, told me that the LCR was receiving another flood of applications to join, as it did after Besancenot's campaign in the 2002 presidential elections. Two or three thousand new applications to join in the Nord Pas de Calais region alone: the immediate question is whether the existing members can summon up the time and energy to respond to all the applications.
Much could be said in criticism of the LCR's orientation. Activists like those from the Liaisons group pointed out to me that LCR says nothing at all about how to fight for a workers' government which might implement its central campaigning demands (mostly political demands, demanding government measures); and moreover the LCR's nearest approach to a central political slogan - "repartition des richesses", or redistribution of wealth - is flat reformism (we want not a more even sharing-out of wealth, but collective, democratic, social appropriation of the productive wealth).
However, LO said none of that.
LO is by no means in decline. At the fete, they declared that they now have 8,200 members and sympathisers. LO's definition of members is very strict, so most of those would be sympathisers, but still, it is a formidable force, and notoriously well-organised.
But in the presidential elections this year LO got a poor score - 1.3%, less than a quarter of what LO got in 2002 and 1995.
LO's first speaker, Marc, explained that as a result of "a profound retreat in class consciousness" among French workers.
What caused that retreat? The absence of a Marxist party willing and able to argue working-class ideas, he said. "There is nothing spontaneous about it".
That argument would seem to lock revolutionaries into a Catch-22. Because there is no large Marxist party, the workers lack class consciousness. Because the workers lack class consciousness, the Marxist groups can't win votes, and a fortiori can't build a large party.
In fact what Marc seemed to think is that class consciousness among workers (of an unsatisfactory, inadequate form, no doubt, but still, class consciousness of a sort) had been sustained and nourished for decades by the French Communist Party. Now the Communist Party has gone down in flames, and revolutionaries are left with the scorched earth.
Presumably - though Marc did not say so, and the LCR speakers posed no questions about it - this assessment also dictated LO's shift of attitude on the second round of the presidential elections. This year, for the first time in 26 years, LO returned to its habitual attitude of 1981 and previously, calling for a vote on the second round for the Socialist Party candidate, out of "solidarity" with the workers voting SP against the right.
In the intervening 20-odd years, LO explained its refusal to make any such call on the grounds that workers had now seen what the SP was like in government; but its real calculation, I suspect, was that it wanted to chime in with the attitude of a significant number of CP members and voters who detested the SP and expressed their protest against their party's alliance with the SP by refusing to vote SP on the second round. That body of CP-oriented "militants" has now collapsed.
There is some truth to Marc's assessment. The French CP did inculcate an idea of the working class as a distinct group in society, hostile to other classes, to a degree beyond anything the British CP or Labour left did even in their most vigorous days. But that "class consciousness" was tied up with Stalinist rubbish to a degree which poisoned it irrevocably. The implosion of the CP does leave French workers somewhat bewildered, lacking in confidence, and suddenly shorn of most of the experienced activists who used to sustain their organisations. But it does not do away with class consciousness - about which, yes, there is something spontaneous - and in the long term it is the necessary clearing-away of an obstacle to organisation on the basis of workers' democracy and liberty.
The immediate question posed to the LO speakers was, how to explain that Olivier Besancenot of the LCR had held and increased his vote. Aha, said Marc disdainfully, that was only because Besancenot had played on alternative-globalisation, ecological, and feminist themes. LO would stick with the basic class issues, come what may.
In practice, this attitude expresses itself in a rather dour and perfunctory tone to LO's election campaigning. LO's posters for the upcoming legislative assembly elections, for example, are headed starkly "vote LO for a programme of defence of the workers", and most of the space is taken up with very solid print stating (rather wordily and stodgily) just three demands: open the books, cut government subsidies to business, tax the rich. No graphics. The LCR's posters, whatever criticisms you make of them, at least show a desire to catch the imagination. This difference must explain a fair bit of the difference in electoral success.
In any case, the LCR speakers had no difficulty in rebuttal. It is the duty of Marxists to take up such themes as ecology in our own way, they said, rather than leaving them to the bourgeois ecologists. All the surveys showed that Besancenot's electorate in 2007 was heavily working-class (more so than in 2002), and was attracted mainly by his agitation on straightforward, direct working-class themes.
Greek Trotskyists
I had discussions with activists from the Greek Trotskyist organisation OKDE. Other AWL members had met OKDE people at the Lutte Ouvriere fete in 2006, but this was my first contact with them.
The discussion was limited by the OKDE comrades' restricted English and my complete ignorance of Greek, but here's a report on what I could gather. The OKDE comrades are keen to continue the discussion.
The OKDE was previously affiliated with the Mandelite Fourth International, but has broken away in protest at the self-mutation of that grouping from revolutionary politics "into a 'pluralistic' organisation which fights for socialism... [replacing tactics towards anti-capitalist groupings] by merging with those organisations, or even with radical petty-bourgeois currents... implementation of a popular front policy... participation of the Brazilian section in the bourgeois Lula government and [vote of confidence by] the Italian section in the imperialist Prodi government..."
However, the OKDE comrades said, they found the "alternative Fourth Internationals", Morenist and Lambertist, no good, and they want to link up with left-wing groups within the sections of the Mandelite Fourth International, in France and Ireland for example.
I put it to them that they were right about the Mandelite FI being "liquidationist", but it was not new. In the 1950s and 1960s its groups were functionally, for the most part, promoters of the project of a sort of broad left wing in either the Communist Party or the social-democratic party (depending on circumstances) of the countries in which they operated. On the international scale, they were "liquidationist" successively towards the Yugoslav CP, the Chinese CP, the Vietnamese CP, the Castroite current, the Sandinistas, etc.
The fundamental disorientation was the idea (to which they held from 1948 to the 1980s) of an ever-advancing "rise of the World Revolution", to which they should orient, a "rise" which was manifested not through working-class activity but through the conquest of power by Stalinist (or Stalinist-tending) forces in a series of poorer countries.
Thus the debacle in 1989-91. The "rise of the World Revolution" culminated in a huge (and much, and sincerely, hoped-for) rising of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the USSR; and when the dust settled, all the supposed "conquests of the World Revolution" had vanished - had been proved to be a matter of illusion.
After the debacle, the Mandelite orientation to whatever seems most dynamic in the general "process" remains - but their confidence in that "process" being "revolutionary" is deeply shaken.
The OKDE comrades said they agreed with what I said, though how clear my argument was when translated into Greek I do not know.
A recent document of theirs made a lot of their condemnation of the Mandelite FI's disintegration depend on the idea that it happens at a time of "the deep crisis of the world capitalist system, the rising course of class struggles".
My view, I said to them, is that political liquidationism is wrong at all times, not just times of crisis. A condition which continues for 35 years without a break - which is how they describe "the crisis" - is (whatever else it may be) not a crisis.
Capitalism today pauperises, throws millions into unemployment, and causes great suffering. It does that because it is capitalism, not because it is in crisis. It is not in crisis right now. It is expanding.
And "rising course of class struggles"? I wish it were true. But not yet.
The OKDE comrades explained that they did indeed classify capitalism since 1973 as in "constant crisis", manifested in such indices as high unemployment and debt burdens.
The document charges that the Mandelite FI has "abandoned the Marxist revolutionary position of critical support to the movements and backward countries against imperialism".
I said that the revolutionary Marxist principle which we recognise is that of solidarity with movements of national liberation against the imposed rule or overlordship of big powers. We give no support to the paleo-imperialist essays of such powers as Serbia in its long-time colony Kosova, not even against the big powers.
Here we differed sharply. The OKDE comrades said that they had visited Kosova, and in their view the Serbs had "never harmed" the Kosovars. The crisis in 1999 had been whipped up by the machinations of "rich Albanians" abroad.
They said that they did not support the Iraqi "resistance", but thought it important to acknowledge that the blows struck by the "resistance" against the USA gave "hope to workers". I replied that where workers see cause for hope in the advance of sectarian Islamist militias, our job is to puncture such illusions, not to try to build on them.
There may have been a difference on Venezuela, though I'm not sure. The OKDE does not support Chavez, but likewise sees his actions as important "cause for hope", and seemed to say they saw some "anti-capitalist characteristics" in those action. I replied that we see the chief cause for hope in Venezuela as residing in the still-autonomous workers' movement which has grown up in the ferment around Chavez's reforms.
The OKDE say they have about 80 members. They are active among teachers, in hospitals, shops, telecom, and fast-food, and among students. They are discussing a common electoral front with other left groups outside the orbit of Synapsismos (a left ex-Eurocommunist party).
There is an SWP satellite-group in Greece, with, the OKDE comrades said, maybe 200 members, but a very big turnover. They described it as very oriented towards the social-democratic party, PASOK. There are two splinters from the SWP group, one linked to the ISO (USA) and one linked to Synapsismos.
Then there is a rump Mandelite group; a Morenist group; and a small group linked to PO in Argentina and the McPCL in Italy
Alain Krivine on the history of the LCR
Alain Krivine spoke at the fete about his new book, Ca te passera avec l'age, which he described as not really an autobiography, but an attempt to explain and popularise some ideas through recounting his personal experience.
Krivine is the longest-standing leader of the LCR, the French Mandelite organisation. He must have plenty of experiences to recount. According to an account by sympathisers of the LCR, he started a network of aid to the Algerian independence fighters of the FLN, on his own initiative, at the age of 16.
He was then a member of the French Communist Party's youth movement, sufficiently orthodox and diligent to be sent to Moscow on a special training session, which is where he met a young Algerian activist who spurred him to do do something more for the Algerian cause than the CP's pious words about "peace in Algeria".
Returning to France, he found the CP frowning on his enthusiasm. He confided his disappointment to his twin brother Hubert and his older brother Jean-Michel. They helped him find contacts to aid the FLN.
Actually, Hubert and Jean-Michel were already members of a small French Trotskyist organisation, the PCI, forerunner of the LCR. But the PCI was doing "underground" work in the CP. So dominant was the CP in the French labour movement that the PCI thought it had to get inside it in order to find worker contacts; so Stalinist was the CP that the PCI's activity was strictly "underground". Hubert and Jean-Michel did not even tell their own brother that they were Trotskyists until, two or three years later, Alain had become increasingly disillusioned with the CP's line on Algeria.
Alain joined the PCI in 1961. He set about establishing the "University Anti-Fascist Front" (FUA), a movement in which the tiny Trotskyist nucleus organised some five or six thousand students for daring and dangerous battles with the bitter-end supporters of "French Algeria".
Then in 1965 he led a split from the Union of Communist Students - the only successful operation in the PCI's 13 years of "entrism" in the CP - to create the JCR (Jeunesses Communistes Revolutionnaires), which would soon merge with the PCI to become a direct forerunner of the LCR.
Krivine gave us some of that story in his talk, but in a disappointingly bare-bones and perfunctory way. He gave over most of his time to a rehearsal, in the most commonplace terms, of what he considered the main political guidelines for his tendency - an "obsession" with "mass work", and "internationalism" - and a claim that those guidelines had enabled the LCR to avoid the two pitfalls of sectarianism and opportunism.
The claim was astonishingly minimal. His evidence that the LCR had avoided sectarianism was simply that the LCR had not succumbed to the temptation to consider everyone outside itself not worth talking to and so was not still a group of 130 people (as it was when he joined it); that it had avoided opportunism, simply that it still existed and had not liquidated itself into some broader movement.
Lessons to be learned from mistakes? Krivine was disappointingly perfunctory about that, too.
In the 1950s and 60s the PCI had a perspective of splitting off "entire layers" (des pans entiers) of revolutionary-minded workers from the CP. (That is why PCI members did not identify themselves as Trotskyists even to their own brothers. The chance of recruiting individuals could not be allowed to disturb patient concentration on the bigger prize of somehow levering away "entire layers" of the CP membership. Actually, however, Trotskyists outside the CP also looked to winning over "entire layers"; only they thought it could instead be done by some crisis shaking the CP and tipping thousands of disillusioned workers into the hands of revolutionaries who had succeeded in establishing a visible organisation outside the CP).
The "entire layers" perspective was wrong, said Krivine. In fact the near-revolutionary crisis of 1968 did not disrupt the CP at all. Now the CP's membership has fallen from one million at its peak to about 60,000, and those 60,000 increasingly elderly, unmotivated, and not at all revolutionary-minded.
Krivine offered no thoughts on what errors of analysis might have informed the error of perspective; he did not discuss the argument, advanced by some "Shachtmanites" as long ago as the 1940s, that right down to the rank and file "the mentality of the average member" had been "completely distorted" by years of Stalinist theory and practice, and in fact (daunting though the idea seemed in face of a million-strong CP) workers could be won over from the CP only one by one, or in small groups, through sharp criticism of fundamentals (see The Fate of the Russian Revolution, p.411-3).
Beyond that, what did Krivine regret? "The time we've wasted with jokers - all the failed attempts at unity". But, he reflected philosophically, better to be too keen on unity than to be sectarian.
The discussion that followed was also disappointing. Speakers from Lutte Ouvriere insisted on a dour defence of the terms "Trotskyist" and "communist", as against the LCR's habit of presenting itself as the acme of whatever seems the popular name of radicalism - Guevarist, anti-capitalist, etc. Well, replied Krivine, we cannot reasonably expect that a revolution in 21st century France will be a carbon copy of Russia in 1917.
However, I noticed that Jean-Paul Salles's long-awaited history of the LCR, La Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (1968-1981) : Instrument du Grand Soir ou lieu d'apprentissage ?, has now been published.
Liaisons
We discussed with a comrade from the Liaisons group, with whom we share many ideas and have learned many things, though we disagreed with them about their enthusiastic campaigning for a "no" to the European constitution in France's referendum.
The Liaisons group has been working with other small groups - Le Militant, the CCI(T), and La Commune, managing to produce joint leaflets with some of them for some occasions.
Le Militant is a current of opinion rather than a group - with adherents in the CP, in the LCR, and elsewhere - led by Raymond Debord, who was for many years in the LCR minority tendency led by Gerard Filoche; then in the Gauche Revolutionnaire (the French sister-group of the Socialist Party in Britain, formed by a splinter from the LCR youth, and now apparently much reduced). He has international links with a scattering of people owing allegiance to the old Militant tendency in Britain but dissatisfied with both "successor" groupings, the Grant-Woods Socialist Appeal and the Taaffe Socialist Party. The CCI(T) is one of the splinters resulting from the expulsion by the "Lambertist" OCI/ PT, in the early 1980s, of its long-time chief writer, Stephane Just. La Commune is a "Morenist" group.
The Liaisons comrades are looking towards publishing some weightier material of their own - maybe pamphlets - and a summer school which could enable them to gain more activists.
