Is Marc Blondel, leader of France’s third-biggest union federation, Force Ouvriere, a secret member of the “Lambertist” sect of neo-Trotskyism? Was prime minister Lionel Jospin also a secret member, at a time when by all public evidence he was a moderate Socialist Party figure and Keynesian-leaning professor of economics? This book is interesting not so much for its answers — Bourseiller finds both cases too close to call — as for the explanation it gives of how the questions even come to be asked.
Blondel has a long, clear public record, since the 1950s, as a union official, sometime Socialist Party member, and a Freemason, of mild social-democratic views. At the highest point of Blondel’s leftism, when he led FO to support the November-December 1995 strike wave in France, he was demanding only “negotiations at the presidential palace” on the Juppé welfare cuts.
Why should anyone imagine that he is a member of a group which proclaims itself more “orthodox” and revolutionary in its Marxism than any other? Bourseiller shows that the strong Lambertist faction in the officialdom of Force Ouvriere gave Blondel important support in his rise to the top. They have helped keep him there, for example by shouting down his critics at FO congresses. In return Blondel has helped the Lambertists, for example by giving official support to a breakaway Paris committee they created when a faction fight in the main committee went against them. The Lambertists provide stewards for FO demonstrations, and the personal bodyguard for Blondel.
For the Lambertists, so Bourseiller argues, politics in the sense of organised advocacy for definite ideas has been replaced, bit by bit, over the years, by the building of a “network of influence”, so that now influence, any influence, is valued even when it could make no conceivable contribution to the group’s publicly-stated ideas.
Bourseiller details some strange cases. Alexandre Hebert is publicly a prominent anarcho-syndicalist trade-union official of 50 years’ standing. Privately he is a central leader of the Lambertists. Such people as the right-wing press baron Robert Hersant, Jacques Chirac when mayor of Paris, and France’s leading Freemason are on the fringes of the network.
Bourseiller is an honest journalist – he points out that the ordinary pattern of activity by Trotskyists in trade unions and other movements, promoting socialist and militant ideas without secret agendas, is quite different from what the Lambertists do – but he makes no claim to examine the oddities of Lambertism from the Marxist point oƒ view.
British Marxists can find a partial analogy in Socialist Action, an ex-Trotskyist splinter which has now disappeared as a political group — no-one ever meets anyone who admits to being a member of it — but remains potent as a cabal pulling strings in the Labour Party. Its members, presumably, get the satisfaction of feeling themselves to mix with the mighty and exercise leverage which, by a hidden logic invisible to the profane, will move revolutionary mountains in due course; while the MPs whom they court are glad to have active and able assistants, political apologetics, who demand nothing in return except names on the letterhead for this or that pet project.
But the Lambertists not only pull strings on a scale much bigger than Socialist Action’s, but also have a public political side – a weekly newspaper, rallies, demonstrations, petitions, campaigns. How do they do it?
It is, paradoxically, the declamatory intransigence and ultra-radicalism of “public” Lambertism that makes it possible. Their weekly paper Informations Ouvrieres is sectarian in a fashion equalled by no other left-wing paper in the world today. Most of the demonstrations, campaigns, and movements about which other leftist papers would report and debate are simply ignored by Informations Ouvrieres.
Sometimes, of course, struggles become too big for even the Lambertists to ignore. Thus, though with some delay, Informations Ouvrieres had to comment on the November-December 1995 strike wave — but it did so by proposing as the proper revolutionary aim for the movement, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to abolish France’s Fifth Republic! The comment was both very “intransigent”, and very easily compatible with the 300 or so Lambertist full-time officials of FO continuing their support for Blondel.
The network of influence yields “big name” sponsors and a show of “broadness” for the rallies, and in return the rallies give people in the outer layers of the network of influence the feeling that the Lambertists are a force big enough to be worth doing a few favours for. And so the show goes on – and the politics slip further and further from view.
Martin Thomas
- Cet Etrange Monsieur Blondel, by Christophe Bourseiller.