Workers' Liberty

Pierre Lambert, leader of what for a long time was the biggest force in French Trotskyism, died on 16 January 2008 at the age of 87. His organisation - now called the "Workers' Party", and about to relaunch itself as the "Independent Workers' Party" - has in recent years focused most of its efforts on the "defence of the [French] Republic" and a call for French withdrawal from the European Union. In the 2007 presidential election it ran Gérard Schivardi as "the candidate of the mayors". But there is more to the history.

This is a translation of excerpts from an article by Vincent Présumey. The full text, in French, is at http://www.le-militant.org/carnet/lambert2.htm.
Other discussion of "Lambertism":

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Lambert came to the fore as one of the organisers of the trade-union work of the PCI [French Trotskyist organisation of the time] from 1945, with Daniel Renard and Marcel Gibelin. With hindsight, it is clear that that trade-union activity was one of the aspects of the struggle of the post-war PCI which left more lasting results...

Expelled from the CGT [the main French union confederation, Stalinist-controlled] in 1950, and becoming a health-insurance scheme employee and then, quite soon, a full-time official of Force Ouvrière [FO, a smaller confederation], Lambert came to organise a network of trade-union activists who were anti-Stalinists but supporters of trade-union reunification on the basis of class independence, with a paper, Unity.

This paper had an impact in the CGT and among Communist Party activists, and had financing, in part, from the embassy of Tito's Yugoslavia...

An ironical formula from an old comrade sums up well what Lambert was then: the "contact man" of the organisation, a type not necessarily important in himself, and certainly not a theoretician or a political analyst, but an organiser who made contacts and turned them to advantage, as with Alexandre Hébert [an anarcho-syndicalist and FO official], with (temporarily) André Marty when he was expelled from the CP, and with the Algerian national leader Messali Hadj... The talents of the "contact man" were decisive in order not to fall into total isolation from the real French workers' movement...

But the PCI progressively began to revolve around Lambert personally, to the point that after 1958 it could be called "the Lambert group". Other strong personalities were eliminated: Danos and Gibelin in 1953, Bleibtreu and Lequenne in 1955; and Daniel Renard would fade away.

1958 was the decisive year, because the working-class defeat represented by De Gaulle's seizure of power and the establishment of the Fifth Republic, and the rallying to De Gaulle of Messali Hadj, who was being targeted by the Algerian FLN [another nationalist group, by then stronger], but whom Lambert had presented as the "Algerian Lenin", were heavy blows for the group.

The physiognomy of the leading group of what would be the OCI was shaped in a lasting way in those years, and Lambert was the central figure. It was based on two pillars.

There was a group of a few dozen activists at the end of the 1950s, then a few hundred at the end of the 1960s, based on a solid Marxist and Trotskyist education, enriched by the contribution of intellectuals like the historians Pierre Broué and Jean-Jacques Marie and the theoreticians Stéphane Just and Gérard Bloch... with campaigns in defence of activists, trade-unionists, and intellectuals persecuted in Pinochet's Chile, in the USSR, or in China...

Pierre Lambert held together that "group" and at the same time was the key figure in the second pillar, a trade-union/club network which became the official opposition, in alliance with the leadership, in FO, and also had a presence in the FEN [the teachers' union federation, outside both CGT and FO].

Progressively, the "first pillar" (construction of a revolutionary party) would be adapted and sacrificed to the "second pillar" (the bureaucratic/club network of which Lambert was the centre), but probably without a preconceived plan.

That development proceeded at the same time as the OCI became one of the big organisations of the "far left" at the end of the 1960s. In the second half of the 70s, it became the biggest numerically, reaching a peak of about 6400 activists in 1982.

In the far left, the OCI was then the "anti-ultra-left" organisation, advocating the workers' united front, defending traditional trade unionism, literally saving the existence of student unionism by sustaining a "UNEF Unité Syndicale" network around which UNEF-ID [at that time the biggest student-union organisation in France] would be formed in 1980, and rejecting talk of "power int he streets" and "sexual revolution" at the cost of taking on a falsely "Puritan" or even macho profile...

[This is a translation of excerpts from an article by Vincent Présumey. The full text, in French, is at http://www.le-militant.org/carnet/lambert2.htm]