Danger of the growth of a
International Viewpoint #155 • January 23, 1989
FRANCE a lawyer for the OAS, represented this current in the electoral arena. In the 1965 presidential election, he won 5% of the vote.
Therefore, during this postwar period, it was not a lack of of personnel or opportunities that limited the possibilities for the emergence of a reactionary extreme right mass fascist capable of developing a fascist party. These limitations can only be understood on the basis of a Marxist analysis of the conditions for the growth of fascism, as developed in party particular by Trotsky.
As Ernest Mandel sums it up in his introduction to Trotsky's How to Defeat Fascism, the rise of fascist movements is the expression of the grave social crisis of the
THE MOST THREATENING racist movement in Western
Europe today is the National Front in France, which has become a major factor in French politics and a serious contender for control of the country's second largest city, Marseilles, in the coming municipal elections.
The following article describes the origins and rise of the National Front, the debate on the left over characterizing it and how the Ligue Communiste
Révolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth
International, proposes to fight it.
LAURENT CARASSO
HE NATIONAL FRONT did not
T come out of the blue. In order to understand its place, its program and the importance it has managed to assume in recent years, it has to be situated first in the framework of the history of the French right and far right and then in context of the early 1980s.
During the occupation of France in the second world war, the reactionary right and extreme right groups collaborated directly with the Nazis. The Liberation inaugurated long years of disrepute for the extreme right. Before the war, the latter had been a traditional bourgeois current that had grown up among small traders and in the aristocracy. Anti-semitism and anti- communism were the stock in trade of this anti-republican and clericalist current, which showed its mettle at the turn of the century in the campaign against a new trial for Captain Dreyfus.1
The extreme-right leagues that developed at the time of the 1929 depression and on the eve of the Popular Front government were the continuation of this current. They tried to build a mass fascist movement, whose clearest expression was the insurrectionary demonstration of February 4,
1934. In this, they had the support of the big bourgeoisie, whose watchword was
"Better Hitler than the Popular Front."
Most of these movements, including the wing created by the former Communist
22
, Party (CP) leader Doriot, became mired in i collaboration, and the post-1945 national consensus around the Résistance made this current illegitimate for a long time, equating the far right with Nazism. A convergence of far right movements
At the end of the 1950s, the loss of France's colonial empire and the beginning of its defeat in Algeria marked the emergence of a new far right, colonialist current around the OAS (Organisation de 1' Armée Secrète), which found its base of support among the French colonists in Algeria; and the Poujadiste current. The latter current, named after its leader Pierre Poujade, was based on the section of the pettybourgeoisie that saw the onset of industrial modernization in France as threatening the important place in society that it had previously held. The Poujade movement got 11.5% of the vote in 1956.
Symbolically, it can be said that Jean-Marie Le Pen represented a convergence of both movements. He was a lieutenant in Algeria and implicated in torture. He was also a young Poujadist deputy elected in 1956.
Once again, lack of serious support from the French bourgeoisie and the industrialization policy pursued by De Gaulle cut the ground out from under this movement. It was pushed to the sidelines, but a strong resentment remained among the colonists abandoned by France. Tixier-Vignancourt, third age of capitalism. It takes place fundamentally when the capitalists find themselves unable to continue a "natural" accumulation of capital.
Seeds for mass fascist movement established
The role of fascism is to change the conditions for the reproduction of capital in favor of the decisive groups of monopoly capital through force and violence. For the capitalists, building such a movement involves mounting a direct assault on the workers' movement, on the gains of the working class.
Such a mass movement can only arise and organize in the third class of society, the petty bourgeoisie. In phases in which the structural crisis of capitalism takes on an acute form, the petty bourgeoisie, struck by the full force of this crisis, gives rise to movements that combine reactionary and nationalistic feelings with hatred for communism and for the organized workers' movement.
In the first thirty years after the war in France, with the loss of the colonies and industrialization, the seeds for a potential mass fascist movement established themselves. But this violent crisis of the sectors linked economically to colonialism did not coincide with any urgent need of the industrial bourgeoisie to appeal to a fascist movement.
The crisis at the end of the 1950s was resolved by turning to the bonapartist De Gaulle, by setting up the strong state represented by the Fifth Republic. Despite some hasty formulas employed by the French Stalinists at the time, this type of regime was not fascism. Economic expansion, industrial development and the establishment of neo-colonialism offered monopoly capital sufficient resources for maintaining its profit level.
Gaullist populism, the weight of the Communist Party in the working class and the official tradition of the Résistance in 1. The "Dreyfus Affair": Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was accused of treason with the Germans in 1894 and condemned to exile and imprisonment for life. The whole of France divided into supporters and opponents of Dreyfus. Finally, in 1906, he was cleared of the charges and rehabilitated.
January 23, 1989 • #155 International Viewpoint the French bourgeoisie were also adequate up until the 1970s to block any serious new rise of the far right current in France.
Lean years for the far right
This in no way prevented the bosses in the period of prolonged instability opened up by 1968 from using police and parallel police forces against the working class. The Gaullist movement played its role in particular through the Civic Action Service, one of whose leaders was Charles Pasqua, minister of justice in the Chirac government. It distinguished itself on several occasions, including by building small company unions, especially in auto. "Veterans" of Algeria and Vietnam were prime recruits for such jobs.
At the same time, the fascist or extremeright tradition never totally died out. Already before the 1970s, several ideologues tried to reconstitute its forces. But for nearly 20 years, this political current only eked out an existence, jumping back and forth between entering the traditional right formations and forming small strong-arm
The present bourgeois parties include several former strong-arm men. For example, in times gone by, Madelin and Longuet — ministers in the last Chirac government — were among the founders the small fascist group Occident. After Mitterrand's election, another fascist group, the New Forces Party, went over lock, stock and barrel to a small far right group, the CNIP (National Confederation of Farmers and Self-Employed), with Alain Robert and the OAS veteran Pierre Sergent.
In 1973, the National Front (FN) was formed. It was a combination of former collaborators, such as Roland Gaucher, and veterans of the OAS, such as Roger Holeindre, around Jean-Marie Le Pen. The activist organization was made up of strong-arm men from New Order, the successor of the Occident group after 1968.
Le Pen regroups forces into the National Front
The following decade brought this new organization no glory. It failed totally in the 1973 legislative elections. And in 1974, its presidential candidate, Le Pen, got only 0.74% of the vote. In 1978, it suffered another rebuff in the legislative elections.
However, despite these defeats and loss of members, Le Pen maintained his project
FRANCE of consolidating an independent force, unencumbered by any compromises with the reinforcements political group of OAS veterans and a small so-called "solidarist" current, including J.P. Stirbois and Collinot, who were to become leaders of the National Front.2
The National Front's forces were too meagre, however, for Le Pen to be able to gather the 500 signatures of elected officials necessary to put up a candidate in the 1981 presidential election. At the time, the group had no more than 500 members.
The year 1983, for reasons we will look at later, marked the end of this march through the desert. In the March municipal elections of that year, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, Le Pen got nearly 8% of the vote. Above all, the FN made a breakthrough in several small cities where by-elections were held in the fall of the same year, such as Dreux, where Stirbois won 16% of the vote, and marched triumphantly into the city government after making a deal with the traditional bourgeois parties.
From 1983 to the presidential elections of 1988, in five years, the FN grew stead ly, and above all continuously showed its ability to influence the country's political life. What is the explanation for this sustained rise, where did the impetus come from?
The themes pushed by the National Front in 1983 were the traditional hobby horses of the small fascist groups, essentially denouncing the Socialist-Communist government and especially opposing immigration. For several years, New Order and then the National Front had waged campaigns against uncontrolled immigration, arguing that "a million unemployed is a million immigrants too many." This was a paraphrase, even to the number, of the slogan on a poster brought out by the fascist leagues and Hitler's party at the beginning of the 1930s against the Jews.
### NF wins increasing electoral support
In the 1970s and up until the early 1980s, this program attracted only derisory support. But from 1983 to today, it steadily caught on. In 1984, Le Pen got a national score of 10% in the European elections. In 1985, in the elections for local council members, the National Front got a national average of 8.69%, with some spectacular 2. Stirbois, number two in the FN hierarchy, was re- 2x. cently killed in an auto accident.
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International Viewpoint #155 • January 23, 1989
FRANCE high points, essentially in the departments of features. They are centers of old (Italian recent (Algerian and Moroccan) immigration. They have traditionally been oriented toward the former French colonies. They have been both a favorite site for settlement by former colonists and are among the regions hardest hit by the crisis. The economy of many of them has been centered in
All of these characteristics are particularly marked for the ports of Toulon and Marseilles. The latter city has become the symbol of the National Front's advance. Thus, starting in 1985, National Front candidates got scores of around 20% in these
In these regions, the electoral pattern was marked firstly by the polarization of the vote of the repatriated Algerian settlers, of voters who previously looked to the elected officials of the classical bourgeois parties who were themselves ultra-reactionary (such as Médicin, the mayor of Nice, linked to the European extreme right and a fervent supporter of apartheid). The second major factor was the effect of unemployment on a population hard hit by the crisis, which formerly put its trust in the workers' parties and who were disgusted by the policies of the left government.
These phenomena are quite clear. Anyone familiar with this region will say there was no sudden rise of racism in 1983 or
1985. There was already racism against Arabs, as there was 40 years before against Italians. But most of those who blamed the immigrants for all the problems thought that there were other more reasonable political solutions for the crisis.
The accumulated failure of the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie and the reformists in the context of a sharp rise of economic crisis and unemployment suddenly lent credence to the anti-foreigner notions. More than a rise of racism as such, there was an increase in the credibility of racism as a political solution.
A closer look at the NF's electorate
The National Front's original electoral base was then swelled by traditional reactionary voters won essentially from the RPR [Rally for the Republic, led by Chirac] and also from non-voters who had formerly voted for the left. The latter phenomenon also grew steadily, often astonishing election analysts, surprised in polls to find that more than a quarter of National Front voters said that they had transferred their votes to the left in the second round.
A study of Le Pen's voters and of the profile of those who join his party has been done by the journalist Anne Tristan, who worked in the National Front in Marseilles for nine months. Out of this experience she wrote an excellent, courageous book, In the Front. By clearing away the stereotypes about the National Front, it opened the way for a sharper perception of the dangers 11
We find a young working woman, an Italian bricklayer, and a veteran Socialist Party activist alongside traditional "fascists" in the backbone of the local organizations. No more racist than their workmates or neighbors, they took the step of making racism into a political solution, since none of the traditional parties, nor any elected official, was concerned
Since nothing was going to change at the top, it was obviously easier to tell yourself that getting rid of the Arabs would quickly resolve the problems of unemployment, crime and the gaps in social security. It is symptomatic, moreover, that during the same years that saw the growth of the National Front, both the bourgeois and the workers' parties cultivated racism. For example, in 1983, Gaston Defferre, the Socialist Party mayor of Marseilles, claimed to be better placed than the right to fight uncontrolled immigration. And in the same period, the program of the RPR and the UDF [Union for French Democracy, the so-called center party] borrowed many argu-
The two pillars of the National Front's program are fighting immigration and crime. These two themes were so popular in the 1980s in a France caught up in economic crisis that the polls showed a third of French people agreeing with these points in Le Pen's program. It was such surveys that led the SP premier Laurent Fabius in 1985 to say about Le Pen, "He offers wrong answers to real problems." The German socialist theoretician August Bebel saw antisemitism as a socialism of fools. Is it necessary today to point out that racism makes socialists fools?
Sinking deeper into the fascist tradition
Besides advancing these catch-all themes, the National Front promotes what is called a "Poujadist" line in France — battling against the "octopus state" and its bureaucracy, functionaries, taxes. We can let one of the National Front leaders give his explanation of its success:
"What does the rapid rise of the National Front in 1983-84 represent? General disgust on the part of public opinion with high taxes, the octopus state, the flabby state, Marxist sectarianism, the school system, the press, crime, rejection of the immigration policy followed for 20 years by the successive governments of the Fifth Republic, fear of the Communists getting control of the state apparatus."
The National Front is sinking deeper into the traditions of the French extreme right, into the fascist tradition. One such tradition is the ultra-nationalism epitomized by the annual commemoration of Jeanne d'Arc, who is wrongly supposed to be the symbol of France. is the parliamentarianism consistently fostered up until 1986 against the politicians of the so-called Gang of Four (the CP, SP, RPR, UDF).
The most recent expression of the latter aspect was a spectacular action against parliamentary absenteeism, pouring scorn on the parliament. Every parliamentary faction
January 23, 1989 • #155 International Viewpoint has the habit of leaving a few deputies "on guard," while the others leave the keys needed for voting on their desks. National Front deputies who were all present during a night session went to use the keys of the deputies of the other parties to vote in their
In the economic sphere, the National Front follows the vogue of Reaganite and Thatcherite ideas — deregulation, tax reform, massive privatization of the public sector, tax cuts and challenging the "welfare state. " This line is not at all distinctive. In fact, in the 1980s, it was pushed to a considerable extent by the RPR. On the other hand, one of the successes of the National Front, even on this point, derives from Chirac's total inability from 1986 to 1988 to apply this program in depth, in particular because of the struggles by the working class and youth.
In the years 1985-88, two apparently contradictory aspects developed in the National Front's propaganda. On the one hand was the program worked out especially by J.P. Stirbois's team. It was directed at wage earners, a new target for the National Front, and called for the following: selling apartments in state low-rent housing projects to their tenants; elimination of income tax; a 5,000 franc (about $840) monthly child benefit ["maternal wages"]; education payments to families; bringing the pay of conscripts to the level of the minimum wage; allocating 1% of the total housing budget for nuclear shelters for the people.
This rather pragmatic program might seem far removed from that of the traditional extreme right. It is aimed in fact at developing the party's general appeal in a situation where it hopes to use its electoral capital to build local bases in the 1989 municipal elections. On the other hand, for a year, in carefully calculated slips of the tongue, Le Pen has been dropping little phrases appealing to the most classical kind of anti-semitism and racism. In this way, he has shown his ability to play cynically on the anti-semitism that still exists and deliberately get a rise out of established politicians.
Cultivating an image in media
These two aspects confirm the paradoxically very important role that the National Front assigns to politician-type campaigns, media coups, to cultivating an image in the press and television. Most recently, the National Front has been in the forefront of a campaign for reforming the citizenship law. This campaign, which has also been supported also to a large extent by the traditional right, is supposed to be to protect the "French identity,' " allegedly threatened by an "internal invasion."
Lately, the National Front has relaunched a campaign for establishing the death penalty. Also to be noted is that the National Front, which has strong ties to the Catholic traditionalist current through one of its members, Romain Marie, has promoted the campaign against Scorcese's film The Last Temptation of Christ. In the same way, the National Front pushed itself to the fore in a reactionary campaign against people with Aids, proposing to isolate "Aidsatoriums"
Going back several years, the National Front has managed to link up with the traditional extreme-right groups, extending from the National Union of Parachutists to Catholic traditionalists. At the same time, the Front itself has tried to set up social and professional groups. One such is Entreprise Moderne et Liberté (EML), which appeals to employers. Its Administrative Council features National Front Euro MPs (De Camaret, Le Chevellier, D'Ormesson, Lehideux), indicating quite clearly that the Front wants to take the maximum advantage of its membership of that establishment institution.
Extreme right organize amongst the police
Around the EML, the Front has tried to develop a series of professional clubs, trying to attract long-haul truck drivers, doctors, lawyers, pilots and air-traffic controllers. The basis for the existence of these small networks also comes from the exploitation of the Front's base in the institutions, which was disrupted at the parliamentary level by the abandonment of proportional representation. where the extreme right's activity is best organized is undoubtedly the police, where there is a small semi-fascist union, the FPIP, led by National Front members.
Many National Front leaders have longstanding ties to international networks. Here also it has used its Euro MPs to develop intense activity directed toward South Africa, the USA, South America and the Near East - in a nutshell all the regions where the extreme right has influential
Finally, within the Catholic traditionalist community, the schismatic church headed by Archbishop Lefebvre, the National Front has built a current around the Centre Charlier and the Comités Chrétiens Solidarité. The prime organizer of this has been Romain Marie, a National Front Euro MP, who has managed to win a dominant position within the Catholic traditionalist community. The campaign waged against the Scorcese film has shown the effectiveness
On the other hand, it should be noted that so far the National Front has been unable to get a solid foothold in workers' trade unions or among the unemployed, even though in some cities it has managed to make a real intervention into unemployed organizations.
Over and above the manifold links and bridges between the right and extreme right, for several years there have been
FRANCE ideological groupings that bring together members of the National Front, of the
RPR, the
UDF, the
Self-Employed)
strong-arm ma from the 1960s. One is GRECE [whose initials spell the French word for "Greece"], which was founded after the 1968 events. Another is the Club de 1'Horloge ("Clock Club) set up after the electoral victory of the left in
Certain ideological differences divided these two clubs, which for some years have found themselves swimming in different waters. GRECE has developed an anti-free enterprise, European, "third road" ideology, between Atlanticism and the USSR, based on the idea of a Europe of homogeneous peoples. In opposition to this, the Club de l'Horloge adheres to a free-enterprise ideology Thatcher-style. In this latter organization, RPR and UDF leaders in particular rub elbows. These clubs feed the rightwing press, such as Le Figaro, Valeurs Actuelles and Paris Match.
Classical right tries to steal NF's clothes
Since 1983, the classical right has opposed the National Front politically. Drawn into a major political crisis after 1981, one that largely explains Le Pen's spectacular rise, it has tried to pick up on crime and anti-immigrant themes, thinking that in that way it could win back its lost voters. At the same time, confronted with the pressure of the National Front, it sought first of all to minimize the FN's role, which it claimed was artificially inflated by Mitterrand through proportional representation.
It is true that between 1984 and the present, Mitterrand and the SP have deliberately granted the maximum importance and publicity to the National Front in order to accentuate the crisis of the right and break off a current ready to join a broad center coalition. The existence of 35 National Front deputies and 137 regional councillors obliged the traditional parties to have dealings with the National Front.
From 1986 to 1988, the tactic of Chirac's interior minister, Charles Pasqua, was to simply repeat the proposals of the National Front. Thus, a racist and discriminatory policy was applied against immigrants, and deliberate sensationalism was engaged in on the crime question. In general, the UDF and the RPR responded in the same way to the regional council elections in 1985 and 25 the legislative elections in 1986. Their line
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International Viewpoint #155 • January 23, 1989
FRANCE was not to give legitimacy to the National Front by entering into a national coalition with it but to make whatever agreements might be necessary locally against the workers'
Thus, several National Front councillors turned up in the leadership of the regional councils; and in 1988, the RPR and the UDF withdrew in favor of National Front candidates who topped the poll in the departments of Var and Bouches du Rhône. This "realist" policy shocked some personalities in the bourgeois parties, in particular those who claim to represent the "spirit of the anti-Nazi Résistance," such as Simone Veil. But these pious protests counted for little against class interests and holding onto seats in parliament.
Even if the bridges between the National Front and the classical parties are two-way streets, it has been clear that up until 1986 they enabled the National Front to build up its apparatus with former UDF and RPR leaders. Between 1981 and 1986, hundreds of people went over to the National Front from the RPR, as in the department of Haute Garonne; or from the Republican Party [a right-wing component of the UDF] in Paris. It is an evident fact that the National Front apparatus and its intermediate cadres come from the traditional bourgeois
In order to take up the question of characterizing the National Front, we might consider the debate that has been going on in the organization for three years, symbolized by the conflict between two of its leaders, Bruno Maigret and J.P. Stirbois. The first line, which set the tone of Le Pen's presidential campaign, was aimed at making the National Front a party of the right, the right's hard-line, populist, ultra-freeenterprise wing, by smoothing the FN's rough edges. This current put the emphasis on crossovers from the traditional right parties and pressure on the other components of the right.
In opposition to this line, the "solidarist" current of Stirbois/Collinot pushed consistently for the National Front to present itself as the party of the national right, without any compromises with the traditional parties and clearly differentiated from them. As the National Front leader Romain Moue said, "the road of respectability is not our road. The more we remain ourselves, despite gaining elected posts, the more we will gain respect."
Le Pen is skipping back and forth between these two policies. For many years, 26 the French left has been debating these two lines, with the first leading many to downplay the danger represented by Le Pen. Such people have said, in general, that Le Pen's establishing himself in electoral politics would lead him to lose his protest image and to disappear.
Today, Le Pen's party claims to have several tens of thousands of members and a national structure, with a base, even if a limited one, in most of the departments. The National Front leadership, as well as its leadership network, is largely made up of hardened fascist activists whose avowed political objective is to form a mass fascist party. One of the functions of the little phrases dropped by Le Pen demonstrating his anti-semitism against the Jews — a more difficult tack to take in France than racism against the Arabs - is to "armor" his apparatus, to clean out any Gaullist or free-enterpriser recruits who might be too squeamish on this point.
Dangerous to downplay danger of NF
There is no doubt about these fascist aspirations, even if some people still console themselves by explaining that the National Front's ideological reference points are those of the "traditional" French extreme right and not those of national socialism.
This debate is not very useful. It is true that Le Pen takes an ultra-free-enterprise line, which is even criticized by small French fascist grouplets. But this sort of talk resembles the line taken by Mussolini in the 1920s. In a similar way, he takes his distance from the "third road" line that opposes both the USA and the USSR, and has not developed any "anti-capitalist" propaganda. It is also true that such capitalism" has only marked the small fas-
It would, therefore, be quite idealist to downplay the dangers posed by the National Front on the basis of the difference in its ideological reference points. Likewise, the role that the National Front has taken in establishment institutions has not destroyed its popularity because it became a party "like the others." This analysis is based on a view of the National Front phenomenon simply as a protest vote, supposedly coming essentially from a desperate proletariat
This stereotype does not give proper weight to the fact that the National Front first developed in the early 1980s out of the crisis of the right, a crisis that was spectacularly confirmed in the presidential election and which is reflected in the origins of a large part of the National Front's departmental leaders. In a manner of speaking, it would be more correct to say that the National Front today is bringing together all the ingredients for launching a mass fascist party — the leaders, the themes, the infrastructure, the popular following in the petty bourgeoisie and even among certain elements of the working class.
At the same time, everyone can see clearly that the National Front is not a mass fascist party specifically because of its inability to confront the organized workers' movement, to oppose workers' strikes, an inability that is linked to the bourgeoisie's refusal to turn to fascism as a political solution. How far the National Front is from being a mass fascist party is also shown by its failure, despite the clichés that are going around, to replace the Communist Party in organizing workers or the unemployed. There has been a real rise in the Le Pen vote among popular layers in the suburbs where people have been hardest hit by the economic crisis.
The National Front's neighborhood organizations often include wage earners and unemployed, as Anne Tristan's book shows. Likewise, they can take comfort from the fact that the workers' parties seem unable to respond to popular demands and to confront the National Front directly. But the Front still has a way to go before it can really organize in popular layers. For example, its attempts to organize the unemployed in Roubaix and Dijon have not brought any considerable success.
Is this any cause for rejoicing? Not really, because one thing that has been proven in recent years is that in the midst of the economic crisis the National Front has managed to crystallize the most radical current of the traditional right and to exert a lasting influence, as shown by the policy followed by Chirac and Pasqua. Up until today, it has managed to polarize and harden up a few thousand activists and to encourage elements in the state apparatus and among the youth to attack immigrants.
The present growth of the skinheads, who are generally quite independent and sometimes at loggerheads with the National Front, has been made possible by the relationship of forces created by the Naticnal
Reformist parties opened up space for Le Pen
While the crisis of the right has opened up a space for Le Pen, it is clear at the same time that the social and political policy of the workers' parties has made it possible for him to stabilize his forces. The Le Pen current has grown among the petty bourgeoisie, thanks to the paralysis of the parties of the traditional right, to which these layers look in normal times. But Trotsky explained that the second stage, so to speak, is when the petty bourgeoisie can polarize elements of the working class.
While it would be wrong to compare the situation in France today to that of Germany at the end of the 1920s, it is equally clear that the policy of the left, as a result of the failure of the solutions it offered, has opened the way for Le Pen's solutions to gain credibility. Once again, neither racism nor unemployment is the cause of the rise of the National Front among lower-class voters.
The cause is rather the political incapacity of the leadership of the working class, when the traditional bourgeois parties are losing their support in popular layers, to offer a working-class response to the crisis. It is only in such conditions, linked to the subjective factors, that fascist solutions can polarize a section of the working class. The preconditions for such a situation are posed in France. This points up still more acutely the crisis of working-class leadership and the responsibility of revolutionaries.
Now, what would make it possible for the National Front to transform itself into a fascist party is a political choice by a section of the capitalists, if the situation were to deteriorate to the point where where they would prefer to pay the price of fascism to preserve the conditions for accumulating capital. When, in order to preserve these conditions, it is necessary to attack the working class and its organizations directly, physically, the bourgeoisie has no qualms about going outside the normal framework of bourgeois democracy.
For the moment, even facing the present strike wave, it is not to Le Pen's group that the employers have turned. The state and its police and army are playing their classi-
This should not at all reassure us about the situation and lead us to downplay the need to fight the National Front here and now. It would be a simplistic view of things to think that one day, just like that, the bourgeoisie is going to decide to turn to a fascist solution.
Activity against Le Pen needs to be stepped up
In a period of sharpened tension among the classes, the existence of a force prepared to offer a fascist solution is a stimulus to the bourgeois forces radicalizing to the right, an element in the relationship of forces among the classes and an available option. Recognizing that while Le Pen has real forces, he is incapable today of building the slightest movement against the workers' strikes should not lead us into to any false sense of security but rather to step up our activity against him, because it shows that he does not enjoy such a good relationship of forces against the working class in action. This has been shown by his inability to counterattack against the workers' movement and the spread of strikes in the fall of 1988, as well as in the winter of 1986 during the railway strike.
Thus, Marseilles, where a quarter of the votes went to the National Front in the last elections, has been the city hardest hit by the recent strikes (postal service, urban transport, social security workers). And at the time of writing, Le Pen's party has proved incapable of organizing the slightest counterattack.
Wrong analyses lead to wrong answers. This applies to those who think that the cause of the National Front is racism, and who put their main emphasis on denouncing Le Pen as a racist. It is necessary to denounce Le Pen's racism. But the people who vote for him know perfectly well that he is a racist. Thus, moreover, it is illusory to think that the anti-semitic phrases he has been dropping are going to reduce his audience. Likewise, campaigns designed to explain the evils of racism themselves weapons against the National
Working class political response
The campaigns against Le Pen in the name of defending democracy against extremism are also a blind alley. Far from limiting the danger of the formation of a real fascist party, they reinforce it. For social democrats, defending bourgeois democracy means boosting the "democratic" state above classes, appealing to the workers to ally with their bosses in the name of democracy. In Marseilles, for example, it meant calling for a vote for Bernard Tapie, the symbol of aggressive and successful management, against the National Front. Doing this also means appealing to the voters to restrain their mobilizations and their demands in order not to frighten the petty-bourgeois elements and throw them into Le
Such an analysis explains the rise of the National Front as a result of "the economic crisis" and "unemployment," isolating these features from their real cause, which is the crisis of capitalism. This is failing to understand, or not wanting to understand, that the fascist threat grows accordingly in a period of crisis when working-class activity is weakened to the point of disorienting the workers themselves.
The only way to trim the sails of the fascist current, to cut it back down again to grouplet size, is to offer a working-class political response to the crisis that would cleanse society as a whole of racist and fascist growths. Such a response has began to emerge in the revival of strikes since 1986, but it will only really take form if a political counterpart of these social mobilizations firms up. This possibility will be all the greater if the present mobilizations prove capable of linking up wage demands with the demand for more hiring into a single movement against the employers, and therefore present the outline of a working-class solution to unemployment.
Revolutionaries have an important role to play in this by showing that they offer a political solution for the entire working class, for all the victims of capitalist exploitation. For our part, we have never divorced this battle from direct action against the fascists and racism. Such direct action has two dimensions. The first is to realize that the brown plague can be stamped out more easily in its embryonic stage.
Thus, the LCR and its predecessors have worked steadily for 20 years to maintain
FRANCE vigilance and actions against even small groups, understanding that it is always * easier to discourage hesitant * showing them that they cannot grow with impunity. It is a good thing for would-be fascists to feel the weight of the workers'
It is for this reason that during this time we have always encouraged mass demby the workers' movement, against the demonstrations and rallies of the National Front. We have presented this as a task of the workers' movement, not relying on the bourgeois state to act against the fascists.
This is what we did in Paris again this year, promoting a united workers' demonstration for May Day, while the amorphous and divided trade-union leaderships were preparing to let Le Pen parade. In the same way, in response to every attack by the National Front against the workers' anizations, we have to promote self-defence, a united front of vigilance.
The second dimension of this is to build an action front in opposition to racism and discrimination against immigrant workers and their families, against racist crimes
Building a relationship of forces that can compel respect for the democratic rights that are denied to immigrants, fighting for repeal of the racist laws, is not only an integral part of the class struggle and the battle against the oppression suffered by the immigrants. It is also a way of reinforcing the fight to reduce support for the racist political solutions that the racist movements represent. This points up the importance of building democratic antiracist associations fighting for equal rights, and associations of immigrant workers and
Anyone can make analyses of the future of the National Front, looking at the fluctuations in the influence of the National Front, the MSI [Italian Social Movement) or the NPD [New Party of Germany], and also the growth of similar organizations in the Netherlands and Denmark. In this area, as in many others, our policy must not be based on prognostications.
Vigilance, class action against the National Front, action in support of the rights of immigrant workers and an overall fight against austerity and the capitalist projects are the fundamentals of a policy founded on an understanding of the dangers and the sources of the existence of a fascist current, the fundamentals of a revolutionary policy directed to the working 27 class. *
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