Left-wing challenge in
35 seats (Georges Marchais)
FRANCE er may decide to try to overturn the present right-wing majority and put an end to the present "cohabitation". A victory for either Chirac or Barre may result in a dissolution of parliament and new elections in which the RPR and UDF will each hope to increase their share of seats.
presidential election
On the far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen is standing for the neo-fascist National Front (NF). His standing in the polls has declined somewhat after he caused a scandal by saying on television that the Nazi's gas chambers were simply a "detail" of history. But
THERE HAVE been no surprises, little drama and even less excitement. This year's French presidential election campaigns - building up to the first and second rounds on
April 24 and May 8 — could provide a classic study in bourgeois electioneering: personalities come first, policies come nowhere.
But outside of the campaigns of the major bourgeois parties, something new and rather more exciting has been taking shape. The candidacy of Pierre Juquin, supported by a wide range of left groups and individuals organized in hundreds of local and workplace support committees, has breathed some fresh air into an otherwise stagnant atmosphere.
HILARY ELEANOR
RESIDENT Mitterrand has just
P announced his bid for a secon seven-year term in office. Even be.
fore his declaration, the Socialist
Party (SP) leader was top of the polls, with the right-wing vote split between his two main rivals. President Jacques Chirac is standing for the neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), currently the leading group in the right-wing coalition government. Challenging Chirac is
Raymond Barre of the Union pour la Démocratie Francaise (UDF), itself a federation of republican and liberal parties.
These three main contenders for the much-coveted presidency are all fighting for the "centre" ground in French politics.
From the right, Chirac and Barre are both
General election results for trying to appeal to the middle ground, using the record of the previous SP government to attack the left and personal abuse to attack each other. Mitterrand, for his part, in delaying the announcement of his candidacy has tried to stay above the infighting, using his presidential status for all its worth to project an image of "statesmanlike" superiority.
New parliamentary elections may be held
Whether right or left win the presidential election, new elections for the national assembly are likely to be held fairly rapidly. If Mitterrand wins, the Socialist Party leadeven so, Le Pen is still expected to get a frightening 9%-10% of the vote. At present, the NF have 33 deputies in the national assembly, but, even if their support holds up in this election, they are unlikely to retain anything like this number of seats should a new parliamentary election be called. This is because the present government has reintroduced a first-past-the-post system, after the Socialist Party held a one-off proportional election in 1986. Further decline expected in
Communist Party vote
Paradoxically, if the Socialists win the presidential election with Mitterrand, the second, third and fourth places all seem likely to go to the right-wing or far right. Trailing behind Le Pen in the polls are a number of left-wing candidates, presently headed up by André Lajoinie for the Communist Party who is expected to get around 5%-6% of the vote — a big drop even from the 1986 national assembly election where the CP scored 10%.
The new element in the campaign is the candidacy of Pierre Juquin, a leader of a current that has recently broken with the Communist Party known as the communist rénovateurs (renewers). This split of around 3,000 ex-CP members is the most significant in the last 40 years, and is important in that it represents a break to the left from the CP's traditional Stalinist politics.
The rénovateurs have just organized their first national meeting, with 300 delegates attending their conference in January, rep-
National Assembly seats
40 the left
% 1945-1986
Française (UDF)
Communist
March 1988
.30
Union pour la
Démocratie
131 seats
(Raymond
Party
(François Mitterrand)
Socialist Party
51
6
73
58
1945
56
68
78
86
International Viewpoint #138 • April 4, 1988
-20
Socialist Party
214 seats
-10
Communist Party
Barre)
Rassemblement pour la
République (RPR
158 seats
(Jacques Chirac)
National Front 33 seats
Jean-Marie Le Pen
----- photo credits and running heads -----
%
"Our long term resenting a first and decisive step in their trajectory of building a new, revolutionary communist movement in France. But, as they will readily admit themselves, they are nowhere near being a homogeneous grouping politically. While the dynamic of the organization is definitely to the left, there
FRANCE mass revolutionary are many issues on which the pressures of
Euro-communist and reformist thinking are still apparent, most notably around questions of economic programme and the role of the state.
A new force in French politics
DAVID ASSOULINE was a prominent leader of the student movement during last winter's massive protests that defeated
The rénovateurs are one of the principal components of the campaign in support of the government's proposed education reform. He is now
Juquin, alongside the Ligue Communiste working full-time for Pierre Juquin's presidential campaign,
Révolutionnaire (LCR, French section of the Fourth International) and a number of and is one of the four members of Juquin's directorate that smaller political organizations and many forms the central political leadership of the campaign.
unaligned militants.
He is a member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire
The split of the rénovateurs - representing just the tip of the iceberg as far as the
(LCR), the French section of the Fourth International, having crisis in the Communist Party is concerned joined as the result of a fusion last autumn between the LCR
- and the movement around Juquin's campaign are indications of the first small and the Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire (LOR).1 Hilary steps in the recomposition of the French
Eleanor spoke to David Assouline on March 21 at the national workers' movement under the hammer headquarters of the Juquin campaign in Paris.
blows of the bosses' offensive and lack of a workers' alternative.
The election result, and in particular the relationship between Juquin's vote and that of the CP candidate, Lajoinie, will be an important factor in assessing the next steps in building a real alternative to the class collaborationist policies of the Socialist
Party.
At present, Juquin is credited with around 3% in the polls, which is thought to be an underestimate of his support but also reflects the blackout imposed on his campaign by the mass media.
Finally, there are three further candidates expected to get around 1% each. First is
Arlette Laguiller, the only woman running in the campaign, representing Lutte Ouvrière (LO), a group that identifies with
Trotskyism but which generally has a rather rank-and-fileist, sectarian approach to politics. For example, LO are calling for an abstention in the second round of the presidential election. Another far-left candidate is the leader of the International Communist Party (PCI), Pierre Boussel - better known under his pseudonym Pierre
Lambert - who is standing for the MPPT
(Movement for a Workers' Party). There is ecology candidate, Antoine also an
Waechter.
The two interviews that follow - with
David Assouline, a member of the LCR and leader of the Juquin campaign and
Alain Amicabile of the rénovateurs current — explain the importance of the new movement that has been brought together around Pierre Juquin's candidacy, the issues at stake for working people in France and the continuing internal crisis inside the
Communist Party. *
Y OU WERE one of the spokes-
people for the student movement in 1986. Why did you agree to become part of the leadership of the Juquin campaign?
I accepted because it was necessary to find a new perspective in light of the far reaching crisis in the workers' movement and the traditional left in France. Pierre Juquin's candidature could serve as a catalyst to help open up such a perspective, notably for the militants and the electorate of the Communist Party (CP), who might otherwise abstain and may be attracted by a chance to cast a vote of resistance. The same goes for those who have supported the Socialist Party (SP) and no longer be-
Also — and this is a new element — young people who were involved in the student movement of November to December 1986 are looking for a left-wing solution and reject the traditional leit parties. So, Juquin's candidature was very timely as an attempt to unify all these layers, and it offers the possibility of a recomposition coming out of the crisis in the workers' • Could you summarize the central themes of the Juquin campaign?
Briefly, the most important policies that we are putting forward are equal rights and the right to vote for immigrants; the dismantling of French independent nuclear weapons; radical social measures, such as fighting for a 35-hour working week with no loss of pay; a national minimum wage of 6,000 francs [about $9,600]; ecological questions; cancelling the third world debt; the struggle against French colonialism, and in particular fighting for independence for Kanaky [New Caledonia]. These are the central planks of the campaign that we put to the fore. But another aspect is the political vacuum in French politics, the lack of an alternative, and in a sense this is also a central theme for us. Three things are important in relation to this.
In my opinion, firstly the campaign has to raise the question of a balance sheet of the experience of the left [SP/CP] government in 1981-86. Secondly, our aim must be to encourage workers' unity in struggles, against the right and so on. Finally, only the mobilization of the social movements themselves can guarantee any possibility of advancing and winning these demands, of changing society and the social relation of forces in France. One essential lesson from the 1980-86 experience is that it is only such mobilizations themselves that will enable us to go forward.
These are the themes that are the most developed, and have the most resonance in meetings and so on, and around which people have come together in the campaign. • What forces are supporting the cam1. The LOR came out of a group originally expelled from Pierre Lambert's International Communist Organization (OCI) in the 1970s. At the time of the fusion around 30 cores from the joined the French 13 section of the Fourth International. April 4, 1988 • #138 International Viewpoint
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party"
FRANCE paign around Juquin's candidacy?
Firstly, there are the organized political forces. The two main ones are the LCR and the communist rénovateurs, who have now set up their own movement. Others involved are the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), the Parti Autogestionnaire Communiste (PAC) and the Fédération de la Gauche Alternative.2 These are the organized forces, but now there are 700 committees of the Juquin campaign in France, and it's estimated that 53% of the people in the committees are not members of any of the political organizations that I've just mentioned. That is not to say that they were never in an organization in the past - there are a number of ex-members of left organizations involved. But 53% is a very large, a very significant number.
including myself, which effectively provides the day-to-day leadership. From the beginning of the campaign commissions on various themes have been set up. These are working commissions responsible for preparing reports, discussion documents and so on. There are around 15 of these commissions, and they group together about 500 specialists working on various aspects of the campaign, such as alternative economic, ecological and political • What role does the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire play in the
The Ligue plays a very fundamental role. I don't think that either the candidature it-
DROIT
Often these independents come from the trade-union movement, from the social movements or were involved in the struggles of last winter such as the train drivers' strike, and from the anti-racist movement self or the dynamic that has been launched around the campaign would have been possible without the LCR. It has a great deal of militant experience to bring into the campaign at all levels, including nationally, as well as a certain dynamism. In addition, it
DE VOTE
[SOS-racisme].
• What is the impact of the campaign brings a revolutionary dimension into the movement that keeps it anchored well to nationally so far?
I think it's had a fairly big impact. The dynamic that's in motion is not at all a mar-
POUR LES ginal one, judging by the meetings, for example. All the meetings have been mass meetings, attended by the left and by working people in general. Some examples will
• How would you respond to people, like the supporters of Lutte Ouvrière [see introductory article], who criticize the Juquin campaign for being "reformist", not revolutionary and so on?
I think that in an election campaign there give you a better idea.
In Paris, at the big rally held at Zenith on DAMMIGRES March 4, there were 5,000 people. Meetings in Strasbourg, Nancy and Thionville — all in the industrial eastern region — have each attracted audiences of around 1,000. There were the same numbers at Montpellier, Bordeaux and 1,500 at the meeting in Grenoble.
In addition, all the meetings that we've held at the universities and colleges have been packed. In ten universities the meetings have been bursting at the seams, with between 600 to 1,200 people each time. The campaign is having a real impact among young people. This is a new element. In the past, the Socialist Party has appeared to be almost politically hegemonic among students and young people. Now, with the movement that has been brought together around the campaign, that situation is being changed. • How is the movement around Pierre Juquin's candidature actually structured? Where are the committees organized, for example?
The 700 rank-and-file committees are closely linked to social reality in France today and are actively intervening into it. Essentially, there are committees in workplaces, in localities and in the universities and high schools. They also exist in villages, towns and so on. These committees are coordinated at town or departmental levels.
Around Pierre Juquin there is a team of 14 15 people, who lead the campaign nationally, plus a smaller directorate of four people, International Viewpoint #138 • April 4, 1988 is no principle that it should be conducted on the basis of a revolutionary programme. Every political battle has its own objective. recomposition on the left on the basis of some central political themes. The beginnings and end of the process that could spark off such a recomposition should not be confused. The end of the process hopefully will result in a coming together of forces in a revolutionary current.
An election campaign is above everything else a mass campaign, and I don't think that it is possible, in the current situation, to build a mass campaign around a complete revolutionary programme.
Moreover, it should be understood that Lutte Ouvrière has never organized its own election campaigns on the basis of a full-blooded revolutionary programme. They often organize around a number of themes, and in this election the central slogan of Arlette Laguiller's campaign is that she is "faithful to the workers". So I would say that LO are in no position to give us lessons as regards a revolutionary programme. Her campaign is very populist, if not apolitical. Juquin's campaign, on the other hand, allows us to put forward all the key questions around which a revolution can be prepared in France. • What coverage has the campaign had on the television, in the newspapers and so on, and where does Juquin stand now in the national opinion polls in relation to the Communist Party's candidate, André Lajoinie?
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D) ESAR FRAN LCR Votez Pierre TUOUIN LCR TRAVAILLER TRAVAILER LCR Ligue communiste rév
IONS
CAIS
TUQUIN
OUR
KANAKY reduction
OINS salaires
Pierre
TUQUIN
Votez:
• "The right to vote for • 'Independence for Kanaky • "35 hours with no loss of pay
When the campaign first started, we were able to get some coverage in the mass media. But since it has been clear to all the traditional politicians and commentators that we are neither some sort of satellite of the Socialist Party, nor people who are prepared to make concessions to the traditional left, there has been a very strong freeze on coverage by the media. But we are fighting against this continuing censorship.
It is also a political battle, because we think it is fundamental to occupy this terrain. It is not enough to have a correct campaign, we also have to convince millions of people in order to really open up a political perspective; just giving out leaflets or whatever is not sufficient to build a mass campaign today. So this fight against the media black-out has important political
As for the opinion polls, at this moment joinie around 6% of the vote. But, of course, we have to take such polls with a pinch of salt, given who produces them. It certainly can't be said that there is total objectivity in relation to way the polls are carried out. I would estimate that our real support is somewhere between three and • André Lajoinie, the CP's candidate, has repeated endlessly that the Juquin campaign is nothing more than a setup, or a manoeuvre, on behalf of the Socialist Party in order to take votes and support away from the Communists. What's your reply to this accusation?
The Communist Party has been alone in attacking the candidature as a manoeuvre by the Socialist Party, or some sort of SP trojan horse. I think it is simply a classical Stalinist lie, based on absolutely no facts or
At a political level, the policies defended by Juquin are to the left of those of the Communist Party and, therefore, also well to the left of Socialist Party. The CP just want to sow confusion and to reassure their own base, which is in crisis, so as to prevent any self-questioning by their members and to try to block any possibility of them being attracted towards the Juquin campaign. But that won't work; it won't wash. • A big debate has just been opened up by the Central Committee in the LCR around the strategy for building a revolutionary party.
This has been partly sparked off by the discussion on what the LCR's per-
FRANCE spective will be after the second round of the presidential election vis-a-vis the renovateur current and the Juquin movement, whether the committees will continue and so on. What are your views on this discussion?
I think that, fundamentally, the recomposition that is taking place, launching now, must have as its objective the building of a revolutionary party. That also implies a debate about "what is a revolutionary party?" That is the long-term objective. It is a process. The electoral campaign is not going to be the final link in the chain of that process; it can only be a beginning. So it's necessary to continue this process, with the forces brought together by the campaign. A vital part of these forces are political organizations, and they have to carry on as before. They will still have a role as before.
The organizations must continue not just because they already exist, and are viewed as some sort of problem, but because they have a role to play in this recomposition. The rénovateur current in particular has a fundamental part to play: to continue to welcome into its ranks militants who are leaving the Communist Party because of its crisis, a crisis that will continue. These militants who leave the CP are not ready just to go anywhere, and in that context it's very good that there is a communist organization, that has come out of the CP itself, like the rénovateurs.
The LCR still has an important role to play as well, particularly among young people where it has scored some successes in the last period and gained a certain authority. It is also essential in relation to all those who have already been seeking an alternative to the left of the SP and CP for a number of years. In addition, the LCR is necessary because of its role in the discussions that are drawing lessons from the record of the traditional left parties.
Next, there are the committees that have been created around the campaign. It is in the committees that a large number of far-left militants have been brought together, and they want to continue to have a unified intervention into their workplaces, into the mobilizations taking place and into their trade unions, as well as at a more general political level.
And I think that the process that could bring about a recomposition, and hopefully allow us to build a mass revolutionary party, must be a process that establishes a twoway relationship between the committees and the various political organizations themselves. If we can link these two components up, I think we have a good chance that we can continue to build something together. * 2. PSU: this originated as a left split from the Socialist Party during the Algerian war. It grew after 1968 through identifying with social movements, self-management and the left-wing of the CFDT trade-union. It has since suffered major splits back to the So- cialist Party. 15 PAC: formerly the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist. April 4, 1988 • #138 International Viewpoint
«We have decided to work for a recomposition of the revolutionary movement"
ALAIN AMICABILE is one of the leaders of the communist rénovateurs. Now aged 39, he joined the French Communist
Party (CP) in 1967, becoming a leader of the Young
Communist League and subsequently secretary of the CP's
FRANCE muniste or movements such as the environmentalists, anti-racists and so on. It seems to me that on the big questions there is a similarity of views. This does not mean that our views are exactly alike, but that fundamentally all those who are coming together
Meurthe and Moselle area federation. Amicabile was elected to the Central Committee from 1979 until 1985, at which date he joined the opposition inside the CP.
He was interviewed by Ariane Merri in December, shortly before the rénovateurs held their first national meeting on
January 9 and 10 this year. After two days of debates, to which a number of guests were invited, the rénovateurs established themselves as an independent organization with a journal, Tabou, membership cards and so on.
OW DID the crisis break out inside the Communist Party?
And how did the rénovateur movement develop out of this
The 1984 crisis, although the most recent, is not the only one that the French CP has experienced. This party has been going through crises for at least 30 years, each time it has appeared to be able to resolve them by using the same methods.
Everyone who asked questions, who raised the problem of the relationship of the party to the whole of society, they have all left or simply been expelled. This is a result of the way the party functions, and the impossibility of raising criticism inside it.
Fundamentally, what changed in 1981 and worsened in 1984, in my opinion, was that the party began to slip seriously electorally in a way that it had not done up until then. It was in this period that the crisis of the CP ceased to be confined to its internal life. It became confirmed by society itself.
In order to understand and assess the internal crisis and why it came out into the open, you have to keep the problem of this slide in mind and understand it.
The history of our setbacks after 1973after the signing of the Common Program in 1972 — shows that they began in periods of unity and accelerated in periods of disunity. It is not at all that we have to choose between two evils. In my opinion, the same mechanism has been at work in both situations.
Over and above the so-called problems
16 of unity, the French Communist Party has failed to master the problem of finding its
International Viewpoint #138 • April 4, 1988 place in the array of political and social forces. Starting in 1984 — and this is even truer now, if we can believe the projections for the coming elections — the Communist Party fell to the threshold of survival as a political party counting for something in • What is the origin of the rénovateur
The rénovateur movement came out of the crisis of the Communist movement and our refusal to follow it along to the point of marginalization. It bases itself on the social movements of the recent period, which confirm our view that the revolutionary current had not run out of steam - in fact the opposite is true — but that it had to be offered political perspectives, perspectives which the Communist Party has not offered. And it is glaringly obvious that the Socialist Party does not serve as a vehicle for transforming society. So, if there is no detonator current recomposing to the left, a progressive force capable of uniting a broad enough movement around proposals for radical reforms of the society, then in the present state of affairs there will be no real perspectives in this country.
The rénovateur movement was born out of this recognition, out of this crisis, out of this absolutely vital need now to pass the CP on its left. This means that we are not taking up a position between the CP and the SP; we are not a second Communist Party. This is why a lot of people are looking toward this movement and those who speak and act in its name, whether it be political organizations like the Ligue Comhave the same sort of radical response to offer to the big questions.
This is not combining all the the losers, all the small fragments of a left that has lost out for 15 years in battles in the apparatuses or in its relations to society. Something quite different is happening, and this is precisely one of the reasons for the impact of Pierre Juquin's candidacy, which was announced some months ago. What is taking form today is the idea of the need for a recomposition of the revolutionary current that would not be a gathering of the grouplets And when I say "grouplets," I am not pointing a finger at anyone. I have no disrespect for anyone, and especially not for those who, in very difficult times, have managed to maintain a communist identity in society. I think that we have every interest, all of us, in unhesitatingly claiming our heritage. We have come out of a common way of thinking, even if by different routes, from a culture bearing within it everything that is most radical for the emancipation of
We have no need to deny where we have come from; it would be a grave political error to do so. All rivers have a source, and our source is communism. And a lot of people today, without being communists — some of them even come to the movement saying that they find the word "communism" and what they think it represents repellent — see things basically in the same way as we do. On the big questions that determine the framework of change, the revolutionary transformations, there are very few things that separate us.
Millions of people are concerned, as a result of the history of our country itself, because of the place that the communist current holds in it. This current goes back well beyond the formation of the Communist Party and is part of the legacy of the very particular history of the French workers' movement. In my opinion, one of the reasons for the crisis of the left in France is that this communist current, which, I repeat, has not disappeared, no longer has a credible enough expression for those who tend to share this point of view, and in this society there are millions of them. • What happened in 1984 and why did
the veiled, internal crisis in the CP come out into the open? For the first time something organized - the renovateur current - came out of this crisis. Beforehand, when individuals or groups were in disagreement with the party leadership, they slipped away and retired into their personal lives or often joined the social democracy. But they never have proclaimed as you just did, a communist identity. They never offered, as you have done, an alternative to the CP, assuming this identity and this tradition in a systematic way.
In a paradoxical way, in order to understand clearly what happened in 1984, you have to go back to 1981. There were all the setbacks that I talked about after 1973, and which, I repeat, occurred in periods of unity and grew in periods of disunity. They created at least a certain disarray, since electoral questions cannot be underestimated in a country like ours. But 1981 marked the first big electoral reverse for the CP, whose vote fell from 20% to 15%. We realized at the time that there had to be other causes besides the pat explanations the
However, in the month following May 1981, there was a sort of artificial rehabilitation of the Communist Party in society. It should not be forgotten that because of its strategy, the Communist Party is very wrapped up in this question of universal suffrage and the recognition that it offers in society, and the fact that the Communist Party had a few ministers in the government could, in a certain sense, blur this grave setback.
Moreover, we thought that in that way we were going to "recover our health," without having to analyze the underlying reasons for the setback. The years that followed showed that far from being "rehabilitated," the Communist Party had not basically corrected its approach, and oscillated between a left sectarian opportunism and the dreariest sort of right opportunism. Fundamentally, it supported everything and justified everything because we were in the government. So, we came to the 1984 European elections, and the Communist Party dropped to 10%.
The Central Committee meeting that followed was extremely stormy. The only explanation offered in the leadership's report was the same old "it's everybody's fault but ours." And in the Central Committee meeting, that seemed quite inadequate, to put it mildly, since at least 30 speakers violently attacked the less than rudimentary analyses offered by the leadership. What emerged forcefully at this point was that we could not be satisfied with this and that the situation was becoming too grave.
For the first time in the history of the Communist Party, to my knowledge, a report submitted to a Central Committee meeting was not voted on; it was purely and simply withdrawn. But during the summer months, the leadership regained its grip, and managed to set things up so that at the September Central Committee everything was cut and dried again, and the conditions were assembled once again for gradually isolating the more critical activists. They did not pull this off finally, even if the operation seems to have been accomplished now: the Twenty-Sixth Congress [held in December 27] has just put its stamp of approval on the "cleaning out" of the party, which unified 99.3% of the
This is a party that has been drained dry, a party totally closed in on itself (even by comparison with the many sectarian periods before!), a party with a facade of unity achieved at a disastrous price. Just to cite a few facts at random - the Haute Vienne federation has been decapitated, and in the Meurthe and Moselle federation almost all the main leaders were removed or found themselves forced to leave because of what they were asked to do, and so on. So, what sort of price had to be paid for regaining
"All rivers have a source, and our source is communism"
The rénovateur movement was set up at the beginning of 1985, after the TwentyFifth Congress. Its initial approach was to try to renew the Communist Party from within; we had not yet rejected this possibility. This quickly turned out to be a blind alley, a total impossibility, for a simple reason that has to do with the culture of the Communist Party. This culture is based on a dogma that we inherited from the Stalin period, an unwritten dogma but one that still operates: it is the notion of an infallible leadership, the idea that criticism is a danger, that the ranks are incompetent.
What is particularly grave about this, and what leads me to speak of the Communist culture, is that this is not imposed by the leadership, but has been internalized by the membership and functions automatically. Personally, I am not surprised to see a congress like the one that has just taken place. The enthusiasm and the hard-nosed tone of those attending it were not put on or stage-managed by the leadership. They are a product of the very way that the party
In these conditions, we soon perceived the limits of wanting to renew the party from within. For my part, I was one of the most sceptical from the outset. We started to function with a view to exchanging points of view across the party. In the party, there are no tendencies, there is no expression of minorities. Everyone can maintain their own point of view and continue to defend it, but always only within the bodies to which they belong. Many of us were removed from all leading bodies. So, we began to transgress one of the Communist Party's fundamental laws by organizing a horizontal circulation of ideas.
This was a very serious step, even for us personally, you have to understand. No one
FRANCE should think that we went through all this in a detached way. Sometimes it was very painful. We thought to ourselves that we were getting involved in something that might lead further than we thought, and that we were running that risk of being "misunderstood," even by the comrades that we respected and who respected us in return.
Gradually, we transgressed more and more against the party's laws of functioning. We noticed that every time we transgressed further against these laws, we scored points inside the party but, above all - and that was decisive in changing our attitude — we started to create a dynamic in society itself. People watching what was happening inside the CP were rather pleased that there were still communists inside this great ossified body that continued to agitate and to say things that after all • Did this movement then, in your opinion, correspond to a need of a section
Absolutely, it corresponded to something deepgoing. The media and others reported our positions quite obligingly, at least at the beginning. No doubt, in this they intended to show that the party was in such disarray that its chances of coming out of its crisis were slim. But that was marginal. The main thing was the interest that had been aroused. Having said that, this dynamic soon became exhausted, I think because people expected us to reform the Communist Party.
They were waiting for us to make proposals that they could identify with and which would make it possible for them to do something else besides retire from politics or vote social democrat. So, the fact that there were people in this communist current who showed an aptitude for rebuilding solid links with society presented a certain
However, we soon saw that reached the end of this dynamic, that we had to go beyond the situation that had been created, otherwise we could lose ourselves and get stuck in a rut and not longer be of interest to anyone. So, we constantly had to transgress further and intervene into society. That is why we published a manifesto that was not reserved for internal use in the party but which was submitted for debate, in the form of 47 questions, with all communists in the society, who were not all necessarily in the Communist Party, far from it. You might even say that the bulk of communists and revolutionists are no longer in the Communist Party, numerically speaking, that they never have been.
So, we continued to work on the inside, but increasingly we oriented to society at large. This is what enabled us to create a dynamic and be propelled by it. From the moment we turned resolutely outward, we struck a chord with a great number of people. Gradually, the rénovateur movement ork on more and me anny, at 7 order to keep our "virtues" in proportion, i April 4, 1988 • #138 International Viewpoint
FRANCE is worth pointing out there is no "genius" among the leaders of the rénovateur
Without any false modesty, taking a good look, we had nothing very new to offer basically beyond what some of our illustrious predecessors in the critical communist movement had said. A lot of them had a much bigger aura than most of us. But they did not have an enormous success. I am thinking of all those who, after contributing to trials against others, found themselves expelled — Tillon, Casanova and Garaudy, among others. And then there have been people like Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont. He is undoubtedly one of the communist leaders for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration. I think that he is distinguished by a remarkable power of creative thought and vitality of intellect. Essentially, he said in 1960 what we have repeated 25 years later. All these people, before whom I feel very humble, did not have the success we have encountered.
To explain why we should be very modest, I would say that we drew our strength mainly from the weakness of the Communist Party. When it was getting 20% or more of the vote, when it had hundreds of thousands of members, thousands of elected officials, 20 years ago, critical people had no chance of being heard. There was no point. They were too vanguardist in a way, and therefore easily open to suspicion. But the expression of these views could precisely have made it possible to avoid wasting all the time that the Communist Party has wasted.
Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont said quite appropriately a little while ago that it was not enough for the Communist Party to recognize that it has been making mistakes for 20 or 30 years, but that it had to recognize that those who raised questions 25 or 30 years ago found themselves without exception pushed aside. Failing to do that considInternational Viewpoint #138 • April 4, 1988 erably reduces the scope of the Communist Party's present pseudo self-criticism.
What has given us strength is the advanced crisis and weakness of the CP in society and in the workers' movement today. And, to come back to the Juquin candidacy, when we are in a situation in which a candidate coming out of the critical movement may be proving able to compete on equal terms with the party's official candidate or even to go ahead of him, that is a situation which strictly speaking has nothing in common with the previous situations.
I may seem to be overmodest. But we are in a time of such crisis for the party that in fact the rénovateur movement has a better chance than the previous critical movements, which does not mean that it's all moving along on its own. Activists had to have the courage, and I mean courage, to take this sort of initiative, to organize, to overstep the bounds, to transgress their own norms. But once this was done, they saw that they had a field in front of them that they did not expect, which, while not easy, is at least open. "The CP's inadequacy has left a space to fill"
There is a space to fill. Fundamentally, it has been left vacant by the Communist Party's inadequacy, inaptitude for filling it. Nothing would be more wrong than to exaggerate the intrinsic quality of this critical movement by comparison with those that have preceded it. It was not preordained, it might not have happened, but those who had the courage to lead this current found out in advancing that there was a much more favorable terrain than they thought. • At the moment Pierre Juquin's candidacy has had a quite spectacular impact, especially among young people.
Ligne juste.
Thousands of people who were not active any longer or have never been active in any political organization today find themselves together in the hundreds of committees that are being set up. Without underestimating what the problems there may be - there will certainly be some - if we take the most optimistic view of the possibilities, what is going to happen after the presidential campaign? What are the
I will not answer that question, because I am convinced the present stage will condition the following one. We have decided together to work for a recomposition, a reconstruction of the revolutionary movement. Whether this takes the form of a party or a movement, what is clear is that an organized form is unavoidable. No one can escape from this. There can be other structures, for which I have the greatest respect, the Rainbow Coalition, and so on. But trying to conciliate everyone for the sake of numbers is not necessarily a basis for clarification and effectiveness in political
I think that we need an organization with principles of functioning, a political program. Everyone is more or less aware of this, but I have a profound conviction that it is premature today to say exactly what the form will be and whether or not it will be definitive. We are at the beginning of the recomposition of a movement based on several pillars. It rests on what I would call the "new layers" in society, people who are just coming to politics, young people by the nature of things, but not only them.
And the contradiction is that this movement is mainly marked by people who have a political culture, who come from different outlooks, who have had separate trajectories. For the communist rénovateurs - for the great majority, if not all of them, to varying degrees - their commitment to the rénovateur movement came at the end of personal crises that were often grave. It is by no means an easy thing to leave the Communist Party, to say "I have been working 20 years in an organization — as I have - and now I am going on to something else." That is simple on paper. I have reached that point now. I can look on my leaving the CP without any trauma. But that does not mean that the break was not
We have all come out of a history, of a culture; we have our ways of functioning, we have a tendency to anticipate. This anticipation is absolutely necessary, but it must not be transformed into precipitate action. The reconstruction of a workers' and revolutionary movement that has taken enough bruising has to be done with great caution. That does not mean oversensitivity. But it has to done with a sensitivity sharpened by attentiveness to the reality of the social movement. It is not enough to make guesses, to sniff around. We have to integrate ourselves into it, to steep ourselves in it profoundly. The more we steep ourselves
in it, the better we will be able, together with all those taking part in this experience, to define the subsequent steps.
Of course, I have my opinion, but I do not want to give it, because it is possible that in a few months we will all have advanced a lot. We have to assure ourselves every chance of success in the battles before us. The problem is that we have completely ossified instruments on the left, and it is our ambition to be the bearers of, to represent, a progressive future possible for France. This is a very great ambition. And because it is, we have to have intelligence and caution — not jitteriness — so as to avoid the slightest
For the first time, perhaps, because the crisis has never been so grave, there is a real possibility for recomposing something that would have a "an attractive look" about it and count for something in political life.
What I can say for the moment is that an organized form and program are unavoidable, but the content, the formulations, the forms of delegating power, the role of leaderships and so on, everything that would condition the life of this new organization, this new party, remains to be determined, to be built. If we establish a framework and we said that everything had to go through that first, I think that would deprive us of considerable potential.
Obviously, at a given moment, it will be necessary to decide, but it is this whole movement that will have to decide. And perhaps, because this process will be a long one, we will see transitional organizational forms. We ourselves have inaugurated some, but these are forms that are not specific to the rénovateur movement. For example, the leadership bodies are re-elected every time. We have a national coordinating committee to which the representatives are re-elected, the same goes for the departmental coordinating committees and for the bureau. We have just recommended, but not is not an inviolable rule, that for the sake of efficiency up until the election, unless there is a major problem, delegates should not be changed too often, because a certain continuity is necessary.
So, in action we are inaugurating forms that are not the sort of perpetuation of the delegation of power that we have known up until now. We know that what I called the "new layers" that are coming to politics now are extremely touchy and distrustful of what has existed and do not want to commit themselves to just anything. They have to be offered democratic guarantees and safeguards. Maybe we should envisage a federative transitional form, a front for example.
In any case, the dynamic that is developing shows clearly that there is no need for an extremely rigid framework. I would even say, on the contrary, that I am convinced that too rigid a framework might not be an effective means for mobilizing. Everywhere we go, the same theme comes up again — guarantees, not only about the candidate's program but also about what we are doing. People have to feel that the main guarantee is that everything belongs to them. This is the source of the idea of assemblies, committees, this whole business. I think that everyone is aware that if there can be something new, it cannot be the simple sum of what exists - the rénovateurs, the Ligue Communiste, and the rest. It has to be radically new and, finally, to be very ambitious.
I think that what is very positive at the outset is that everyone, whether it is the far-left or left organizations or the environmentalists, all those who look to this movement want to participate in this experiment. We agree that it is not a simple addition or a repetition of what could exist before. This is already a point of departure that breaks with previous experiences and which has much better chances for success because we already see quite well what has to be done. We will find out as time goes on how we can set it up. But the prevailing feeling among all the forces is that we have to pay attention to what we are trying to do.
"Juquin's candidacy is one phase in an ongoing movement"
The idea that you can intervene in this movement to "gain forces" may be harbored by some individuals, but I don't think any organization has been led by this to join, to lend support or to participate in this dynamic, in this movement. In all the meetings I have attended, I have been surprised by how quickly the old disputes have been relegated to history and no longer encumber the discussions.
To take only one example, no one comes in calling people horrible Trots or vile Stalinists. It is quite illustrative that these two categories, which have been quite marked in the movement, have both succeeded in making the effort to overcome what previously divided us and to maintain what could bring us together today and make it possible for us to work together. Of course, there are problems, as there have always been between individuals in the same organization, by the way, because there is diversity. But the rest has disappeared, and this is a venture that neither category in my opinion would have attempted even two • I think that all those involved in this effort are aware of the fact that this is a "historic" opportunity, not to get carried away by big words. The concrete possibility to rebuild a revolutionary movement does not present itself every day, and we all know that if we miss this boat, there is no telling when another chance will come along.
We may miss the boat, but sooner or later, in other forms, this movement will revive. The difficulty is that it may not necessarily re-emerge in the most effective forms for really transforming society, and lost time is lost forever. But I think that we
FRANCE have no right to risk a failure. We have a historic responsibility, because what is emerging, growing, shows that people are looking to us with more than just electoral
In the meetings we are holding, we see a lot of people who are coming and say that the Juquin candidacy interests them, but at the same time, and almost more, they are saying that there could be something besides an ossified CP or a class collabora-
It is because of this aspect that Pierre Juquin's candidacy is so important, because it can give expression to that need. This has nothing to do with people getting together to pull off an electoral "coup."
Our objective is not to see Pierre Juquin become president but to see him get a significant vote and begin to pull together a spark-plug left current outside of the CP and the SP that will put an end to this swinging from the wildest hopes to the greatest disappointments. If the meaning of this candidacy is understood, that is, phase of mobilization in a ongoing movement, it is not very important at the moment that we have a program on everything. We need broad axes marking the points for breaking with this system and
Our objective in this campaign is not to have a president, or even to get into government. Our objective is that on the election night, the committees that have formed will dissolve in fact, not so that their members can go back to their private life, but so that they can decide what should be done with the structured organizations that exist.
Obviously, the vote that we will get is not unimportant, because it will determine what follows; that is evident for everyone. If we do not make any mistakes, we can win. I think that a rénovateur current was expressed in the mobilizations last year — among students, teachers and railway workers. Rénovateur not in the sense of what we are, but in the sense of a real will for social renewal. If we manage to gain recognition as the possible perspective that is being built for expressing this social will, that will be a radical transformation.
We must advance the four or five axes of our profile for this presidential election — the right to a job, social protection, opposition to nuclear power and atomic weapons, democracy, self-management, equality, and the questions of breaking with the capitalist system. If on the big questions we are able to take in the most progressive and most advanced elements in the society, to be seen as the most relevant representatives of these aspirations, then many people may look to us and in so doing be able to say that they belong to a current in French society that exists and is determined to exist.
The conditions are there for us to be able to succeed. The precondition is that we dump everything that is sectarian and marginal, and retain what unites, and more generally what represents a really new 19 perspective for labor. * April 4, 1988 • #138 International Viewpoint