The French presidential election, April-May 2017

By Martin Thomas

• Macron's policies are bad, they've paved the way for the FN, and if he wins and gets his way between now and 2022, then the FN is likely to come back stronger then? Only independent working-class politics can stop the rise of the FN or similar forces? Absolutely. And left groups in France which favour voting Macron on 7 May, like Ensemble, say that as clearly and vividly as those who recommending a shrug or a blank vote, or more so.
• The candidate is different, and the circumstances and reasoning are different, but the idea of casting votes for candidates whose program we hate, for reasons other than their program, is not new. The argument that "a 'critical' vote for [Macron] will be indistinguishable from those who genuinely endorse Macron’s policy" makes sense only if we think that every left-winger who recommended a vote for Blairite Labour candidates anywhere was "indistinguishable" from Peter Mandelson. People who understood that we voted Blair-Labour despite and against the Blair program, because it still had some links with the labour movement (although it was trying to trash them), will also understand voting Macron despite and against the Macron program, to stop a fascist gaining the presidency on 7 May. "Tactical voting" - voting which is not, as the French say, a "vote d'adhésion" - is not a specialised trick of Marxist aficionados, but a commonplace.
• Ensemble and others can say, in a way that is quite logical and widely understood, that they will vote Macron on 7 May, but hate Macron and mobilise to disrupt and defeat Macron's project. In 1998, no-one said in the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement that they were voting for it, but hated the Agreement and were mobilising to destroy it. It's hard to see how you could have campaigned that way.
• It will look bad if Macron wins and the left is seen to have had a part in it? I don't see why. It is not so hard to understand that the left vote for Macron is coupled with mobilisation against his program. If Le Pen wins and the left is seen to have had a part in that, then it will be much worse than just looking bad.
• And if Le Pen wins, the left will have had a part in it.
• Departing from our tradition? In the first place, our tradition - unless we want to repudiate the left wing of pre-1914 German Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks - is one of always seeking maximum independent working-class intervention, but not of always refusing to vote for bourgeois candidates, not of saying that there is no difference worth bothering about between bourgeois democracy and fascism, and not of saying that there is no difference between a danger of fascism in five years' time and having a fascist president now.
• In the second place, if some comrades are so unsure of their political steadfastness, then they should educate themselves rather make French workers pay the price. "Why did you decide to let Le Pen in?" "I was scared that if I voted against her, I wouldn't be able to stop myself sliding down a slippery slope to voting for bourgeois lesser evils all the time".
• And in the third place, it is superstitious to reject a vote for Macron on the grounds that it implies that routine neoliberalism is not as bad as fascism, and so may blunt the fight against routine neoliberalism. Routine neoliberal capitalism is not as bad as fascism: that is a fact. If it is impossible for workers to hold in their heads the two ideas of a fight against capitalism, and that there are worse things than routine neoliberal capitalism, then there will never be a socialist revolution. But it is not at all impossible. The left used to be afraid of saying harsh things against Stalinism, for fear it would make routine liberal capitalism look good by comparison, but that fear was irrational and counterproductive.
• We can't convince Le Pen voters with a vote for Macron? We won't convince them with a shrug - "not enough difference to make it worth voting" - either. The core of convincing Le Pen voters is, of course, creating a force on the left strong and clear enough to give them hope. Part of that is convincing them that Le Pen is not just a routine politician with some nationalist overtones, but a fascist.
• The mounting evidence is that the mood in favour of shrugging among a significant minority of left voters in France - and the pro-Le-Pen mood among a smaller but still not negligible minority of them - is not the product of a shift to more left-wing views and more working-class intransigence since 2002. The contrary, as you'd expect with a drop in the revolutionary-left vote from 10% then to under 2% this time. Some of the left see large elements of Le Pen's chauvinist anti-EU and anti-"globalism" line as sort-of-left-wing. Others have been duped by Le Pen's "de-demonisation" effort, as she calls her cosmetic rebranding of the FN. Yet others are defeatist and demoralised: "if Macron wins, that only means the FN in 2022, so you might as well shrug". Or nihilistic: the slogan of the recent small anarchist demonstrations, "Neither banker, nor fascist", makes sense only if there is no difference between the general domination of capital (bankers, etc.) and fascism. There is nothing revolutionary about going along with that mood, or with the evasions to which Jean-Luc Melenchon has resorted for fear of confronting the pro-Le-Pen and pro-shrugging moods among his voters.

Cathy at the meeting on the 1st April is keen to stress that this a one-off in specific circumstances. The problem with this is that Martin citing a number of historical precedents cuts across this. He points to the pre-1914 German Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks. He argues that being positively for working-class representation never meant not supporting bourgeois candidates and this interpretation first appears tentatively with Cannon in 1950. If Martin is right then we have been wrong on in this in the immediate past and he is now reconnecting us with the authentic tradition. If that is the case it is surely not a one-off.
Martin claims a difference between being positively for working-class candidates and being negatively against bourgeois candidates. Clearly there is a difference, however the two are inter-linked. It cannot be reasonably argued that supporting bourgeois candidates even in a run-off doesn’t somewhat diminish our position on working-class candidates. We move from a position where we only support workers candidates to one where we only support workers candidates unless we are in a situation where there isn’t one. Then the calculation will begin to be (as Martin has indicated the American Trotskyists did in the past and indeed we have had similar discussion about independent candidates) where these candidates are plausible and if not then what?
Martin doesn’t address the Trump/Clinton question. Maybe in retrospect he thinks we got it wrong. If he does he should say so if not he should explain the difference. As Sacha points out that argument is essentially a ‘dodge’. Martin himself has pointed out that in the past American Trotskyists didn’t call for a vote in the American election despite the presence of ‘socialist’ propaganda candidates, presumably part of that calculation was that the election was to all intents and purposes a two-horse race.
I think that the problem with Martin’s position is a rather static and stagiest one rather than seeing, dare I say, the dialectical movement both in French politics and indeed within our organisation. Martin’s view is vote Macron and then we start again to build a left. My view is that Macron winning, whilst still the preferable outcome, will be part of the process of strengthening the nationalist right. In addition, the likely effect of this endorsement with the citing of historical precedents will set a trajectory for our group of assessing each ‘lesser evil’ candidate to see whether it is correct to endorse them. This will I think lead to diminishing of our politics.
Martin, with rather ridiculous hyperbole, claims that because we are unsure of our steadfastness, we are sacrificing the French workers (again transfer this argument to Trump/Clinton!) Firstly, our steadfastness can only be assured by our collective thought and discussion, which is what we are doing here. Secondly, I do not believe that our small British group advocating a vote for Macron will save the French working class. Indeed, what we can do is make clear the necessity for an independent working class voice and action and not take responsibility, no matter with what caveats, for the viciously anti-working class programme Macron will launch. It maybe argued that, in a panic, it is Martin who is sacrificing the future of French working-class politics.
In addition Martin impermissibly slips between having nuanced ideas, nuanced arguments and how you vote, votes by their nature do not allow for nuance. We have explained this to the Lexiteers ad nauseam. It is a vote for Macron no matter what you are muttering under your breath.

1. I have deliberately not used the euphemisms sometimes used on the French left - "use your vote to bar Le Pen" - and instead said plainly that I agree with voting Macron on 7 May.

2. Voting Macron to stop Le Pen is not taking responsibility for Macron's program or reducing the vigour of agitation for independent working-class politics. Any more than voting for Remain was taking responsibility for the EU's neoliberal policies.

3. The key difference with Clinton/ Trump is that there it was possible to run or back other candidates. Most of the left argued that the Bernie Sanders constituency should affirm its autonomy by voting for Jill Stein. She did poorly - the left in the USA is weak, much weaker than in France - but she did get 1,457,216 votes. The Socialist Alliance in 2001, when it did best, got a total of 58,553 votes across the country, the equivalent in proportion to population of 300,000 odd votes in the USA.

4. The American Trotskyists (SWP and WP both) "shrugged" in the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections - found themselves unable to recommend any action - both because they thought the left "propaganda" candidates too poor to back, and because they described the main bourgeois candidates as not very different from each other. In 1948 the WP recommended a vote for the SWP, the SP, or the SLP, not because the SP or the SLP had got better, but because it knew that otherwise left-minded workers might go for the Stalinoid candidate Henry Wallace. It was a judgement based on circumstances, not on worries about what this or that "might lead to".

5. I pointed out in 2002, when arguing against a Chirac vote then, that not voting for bourgeois candidates was not an absolute rule. It didn't take any "panic" to make me point that out. Of course it was and is a usual rule.

6. Probably Macron will win whatever we say. But it is entirely possible that the outcome may be depend on how the "constituency" of the left candidates goes, and that's something we should reasonably have an opinion about. (If someone asks you about voting on 8 June, you don't reply: "No point me giving an opinion, because our group is so small"). To argue against a Macron vote on specific grounds may make sense. I don't think so, because it is entirely coherent to recommend a Macron vote, on the grounds that he is not fascist, and denounce his program. But to argue against on the grounds that such a vote might lead to this or that (i.e., implicitly, that in and of itself the vote would be a good idea, but is disqualified only because of what it "might lead to") is unsound. It does amount to saying that the French working class must put up with an increased risk of Le Pen because we are unsure of our future virtue.

65% of the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon have voted, in a consultation called by Mélenchon, for abstention or a blank vote on 7 May.

I'm not surprised. And I'm not pleased. I think it represents a compound of fatalistic demoralisation and left-nationalist complaisance towards Le Pen.

What we're seeing is not an advance of the left to a more independent and left-wing position than in 2002, but a regression.

It is epitomised by the well-known intellectual Emmanuel Todd. He will abstain on 7 May. He is and long has been considered a left-winger.

But what informs his abstention? He has become a sort of French nationalist. He was very pleased about Brexit. In advance of the first round, he said he did not know whether to vote for Mélenchon or the conservative nationalist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who has now made an alliance with Le Pen.