Safety in continuity
International Viewpoint #255 April 1994
AT the 28th congress of the French Communist Party, George Marchais, General Secretary for twenty years, stood down. Would this be the event which at last opened the Party up? No. Continuity was the detining feature of the congress. The opposition around Charles Fiterman remained on the sidelines. Only the still powerful Pas-de-Calais Party federation staked itself out against proposed changes. FRANCIS SITEL* Paris, 16 March 1994
T HE French Communist
Party (PCF) is haunted by the obsessive question of its own transformation. For many years successive oppositions have taken up the banner of change only to become progressively discouraged. Once again, it is the leadership which has put itself forward as the force most capable of ensuring this necessary change. The need to renew the Party leadership — which coincided with the need to bring the Party's political orientation up to date after the shakeup of the international and national situation - appeared as a precursor of real change. This in turn provoked a counter-reaction from a powerful conservative wing in the Party, which fought the changes proposed by the leadership.
The documents themselves provoked only limited debate in the Party, and in the absence of groupings established around specific political platforms they did not genuinely reflect the challenges faced by the leadership.
The documents aside, the stated desire to transform the Party could be subjected to three tests.
Firstly, how would the question of Marchais' replacement be dealt with? Secondly, what real changes would be made in Party functioning? This question could be answered in a concrete way, through the debate on the place of 22
### FRANCE the Refoundation current at the congress and in the new leadership. And finally, what innovative ideas would this congress produce to face up to the major crisis of the working class movement?
The congress - "closed" rather than "open" as promised - failed all three tests. For the moment change seems to be impossible.
Preparatory to the 28th congress, the leadership based its "renewal" of the Party around two documents: a Manifesto providing an up to date analysis of the situation, and a proposal for new statutes (the most striking feature of which was the abandonment of democratic centra-
Replacement
But it was Marchais' replacement at the head of the Party which dominated the congress. Would the new national secretary (a title which, in the new statutes, replaces that of general secretary be a partisan of openness, or rather a loyalist entrusted with the job of guaranteeing continuity?
It is entirely symptomatic of this Party's difficulties in providing real measures of change that all the real debates should have to be focussed around such a question. As a result, the debate around the Party's orientation was necessarily deformed
Since Marchais himself had promised dramatic changes, the Party's "document-writers" had to respect his wishes - but at the same time they could not be so audacious as to abandon the previous line and the outgoing general secretary with it. A cumbersome exerci-
The balancing act did not end there. The suspense around Marchais' successor was maintained almost until the end of the congress. While the names of Francis Wurtz and Alain Bocquet were invoked; it was Robert Hue who was chosen in the end. But not satisfied with merely increase the number of his close supporters on the national bureau (new name for the political bureau, Marchais decided to remain a member of this body himself. The PCF missed its chance to take its leave of the Marchais era.
George Marchais, named joint general secretary in 1970 following the serious illness of Waldeck-Rochet, has been general secretary of the Party since 1972 — a twenty-year reign from which the PCF has emerged considerably weakened and transformed.
The PCF of the 1970s was a big party - representing twenty percent of the electorate, an unequalled activist force, giving it an incontestable hegemony within the working class.
Today, it has lost more than half of its electoral support, only retaining influence in certain regions and is going through profound and unceasing internal crises. Its political image has been severely damaged by the double discredit it endured following both the failure of the governmental experience of the left in France and the collapse of Stalinist regimes to which it remained attached for such a long time.
New reality
The Party has to adapt to a new reality in which it is no longer, and never again will be, a "front-runner" in French party politics, whose recognised and legitimate goal was to run the country, and to transform society.
The new situation has not only led to a decrease in the Party's size, but to a change in its identity. In a certain sense, the problem is not so much one of abandoning old ambitions - time itself is eroding resistance to accepting a fait accompli - as it is managing to meet current responsibilities within a new relationship of forces and new political realities.
For while the PCF can no longer claim to be vying for governmental power, it continues to be a significant force with considerable strengths in a worker's movement which is both in crisis and in the process of major self-redefinition.
It has an apparatus of several thousand full-timers. In spite of its electoral collapse, it has an important number of elected officials and municipal governments, which give it social roots, material means, and the wherewithal for political intervention. It has organic links
*The author is a member of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), French section of the Fourth International.
International Viewpoint #255 April 1994 with the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), which remains the main trade union confederation - the most active and present when it comes to struggles on the ground.
For those of us who continue to see politics in terms of class struggle and social transformation, these are decisive acquisitions for confronting the crisis that the French working class movement is currently going through.
In the face of an aggressive and arrogant right-wing, many activists - in spite of the weight of defeats and disillusionment - are not insensitive to the need for renewal and new political pro-
While the Socialist Party (PS) might be the best placed to respond to these needs on an electoral and institutional level, it has less weight in the arena of social mobilisation and struggle.
As for the revolutionary left, forces
Party leadership. Most of the PCF's mayors identify with the Refoundation
There are trade unionists who are in a de facto break from the Party, or who call for real trade union independence from the Party. On the eve of the 28th congress, Alain Obadia, a central leader of the CGT, announced in no uncertain terms that he would no longer be a member of the PCF leadership. This flies in the face of long-held traditions in
Fragmentation
All these developments point to a dynamic, not of splits on a clear political grounds but of fragmentation and the establishment of feudal-type groupings. These are groupings of a type that will cling to their interests and maintain rather lax links to the
The PCF opposition
THE opposition forees that have emerged within the PCF in the last few years have called for renewal from different standpoints. First, in
1988 there were the Renovators who supported Pierre Juquin, a former member of the political bureau, for president in the elections. They were the last to be officially expelled. Refusing to follow them out of the party, the Reconstructors, around Claude
Poperen - a former member of the political bureau, long responsible for work in the factories and highly respected in the party formed a new opposition. This opposition had many activists and a lot of electoral support in a number of important regions.
They became more and more autonomous and eventually quit the party.
Along with the remnants of the Renovators they formed Alternative Democracy Socialism (ADS). The third wave of opposition was the Refounders, behind former ministers Charles
Fiterman, Jacques Ralite and Anicet
Le Pors. They enjoy considerable influence in certain sectors of the
PCF, in particular among mayors of of the critical left that have emerged big towns and many trade unionists.
from the PS and the PCF, and certain
The Refounders became a de facto sections of the green movement aware public faction, active within a pluralist of the importance of social struggles, organisation called Refoundations there are enormous obstacles on both the with its own newspaper, meetings path to regroupment and a real capacity and political initiatives. Charles Fiterfor political intervention.
man, who was the number two man
In such conditions, the PCF has in the party, announced at the 28th considerable margin for manoeuvre as congress that he was quitting all his far as putting itself forward as an indisresponsibilities in the party.
pensable force for those who refuse to
These successive waves of opposirally to a renewed social democratic tion rise higher and higher in the force.
ranks of the party, and have influenced broader and deeper elements
Breaks within the party. The leadership has been more and more conciliatory, and
The question is whether this state of no longer takes disciplinary meaaffairs — with its limits and potential sures. Nor does it take political initiacan be confronted without any fundatives to try to re-absorb the various mental breaks in the Party, continuing political differences. A kind of passive modus vivendi has set in.
along in much the same way as before.
Or if, on the other hand, this game of
This appears to have created diffe fake renewal will prove to be destructirences within the Refounders themve.
selves. Some have followed Fiterman
In several fields, there is a growing and have decided to break from a divergence between the role of PCF process that offers no perspectives.
members as trade unionists — elected
Others, especially elected officials, representatives and rank and file actihave opted to hang onto the PCF label in view of the next round of elecvists — and the political and programtions. The Refounders did not wage a matic meaning of PCF membership battle at the 28th congress, and have
This is the origin of certain developbeen marginalised in the new leaderments that are more or less under control
-and sometimes even tolerated by the leadership for short-term reasons. For example, there are PCF candidates who take their distance from the Party at election time. There are deputies who play down the communist reference in their election campaign - personalising their campaign to an extreme, putting forward their abilities as managers, and even underlining their opposition to the
Party apparatus — and will doubtless be called upon to theorise their situation with specific political
This is connected to the growing distance that exists between the decisive political role played by the PCF through its activists, and the Party as an institution, lacking both a coherent political project and a living ideological reference
Such a separation can be managed, if the only goal is that of surviving pure and simple, by adapting an orientation determined by short-term considerations and embracing the most base forms of empiricism. However, to mend this division would require a redefinition
— a cultural revolution - which would tackle the major contradictions that riddle the Party.
There are three central areas in which such a redefinition would have to be made.
• First, there is the necessary and difficult break with Stalinism.
This does not mean writing yet more essays listing the damage done by Stalinism.
This has been undertaken for some time, although with uneven results. What has been lacking is recognition of an unrelenting political reality: the continued and contiguous joint existence of the Party and Stalinism.
George Marchais' belief in 1978 on the "globally positive balance sheet" of the countries of the Eastern Bloc had a sufficient enough impact on political opinion and consciousness that it needs to be politically addressed.
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The number of PCF full-timers has been calculated The influence of the PCF
International Viewpoint #255 April 1994
• Third, there is the question of pluralism and democracy.
In its unitary approach, the PCF leadership always reduces the left to the PS and the PCF alone, with reference made on occasion to the Greens. This is because it wants to approach matters within a classical framework which requires no
• 1900 mayors, of which 123 are in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants (half of these are in at 5,000. This includes:
self-doubt about the PF's identity and project. But the crisis of the working class movement is such that this type of conservative approach is inadequate.
The PCF will not be able to escape the process of recomposition that is now underway.
On the one hand, the PS has undertaken a rebuilding process which, if successful, will exert a power of attraction which the whole PCF or sections of it will not be able to resist. On the other
• 14 senators. • 7 European deputies. 0
The new national secretary, during his first major political public appearance on television on 6 February 1994, went so far as to say that "what appeared to be globally positive was not". This after saying that, "the Communist Party, with George Marchais, has had the courage to break with the Soviet model. This is one of the most important developments in the current period, that has meant the Party can launch the new round of renewal begun at the 28th congress."
It is clear that it is not with such reasoning and trickery that past accounts will be settled, to put an end to the intimate links that unite the PCF and Stalinism, including in regards the the Party's subordination to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No one can ignore or hold in contempt the revelations of the secrets of this long relationship - for example, information suggesting that Marchais rose to the leadership of the PF according to the wishes of the Soviet leadership.
If this question is not treated seriously it can only further weaken the political fabric of the Party. The accumulated delay — even in comparison to other Western European communist parties, and now even to those in the Eastern Bloc itself - can only aggravate the problem and make it even more difficult to find a solution.
• Second, the Party has to determine what course it will follow after the collapse of the Union of the Left.
The PCF of today is a direct product 24 the period of the Union of the Left, that led to the Mitterrand victory in 1981 and a decade-long experience of the left in government. But during those years the PF leadership was unable to escape the twin dangers of either sectarian denunciation combined with ultra-left verbiage against the PS, or an opportunist
Both approaches share much in common, especially since it made it impossible for activists and workers to intervene, and provided no solution to the question of the unity of opposing political forces within the worker's movement.
### Concessions
The problem is all the more important in that every election obliges the PCF to solicit PS votes and make concessions to its leadership. The search for a political perspective necessarily poses the question of an alliance with the PS — unless one chooses to incessantly declare that past strategic errors cannot be repeated.
Nevertheless, within a classically reformist and electoralist framework that has never been questioned, only an alliance of this type with the PS can raise the prospects of electoral victory and a presence in the government. Robert Hue has recognised that "political agreements" cannot be excluded: "There are millions of men and women who are waiting for some kind of political perspective." It is clear that this means agreements with the PS.
hand, the alternative to this project cannot be represented by the PF as it is today. Such an alternative requires the formation of a new political force that includes all or part of the far-left, a part of the ecologist current, and currents which choose to break from the PS and
The PF can neither remain outside this process of recomposition, nor try to co-opt it to its own ends. It finds itself swept up in the redefinitions that are taking place and that are sure to continue in to the future.
This is all the more true in that this process of recomposition is linked to the recomposition of the trade union movement. The CGT cannot remain the major union confederation that it is unless it breaks free of the grip of the PCF and appears as a genuinely independent from it.
### Distance
For its part, the United Trade Union Federation (FSU) — which originated in the break-up of the PS-led National Teachers Federation (FEN) and now holds a majority in the educational world - is led by a trade union current which was close to the PCF and the CGT, and that long ago took its distance from them. This has allowed it to resist the destructive manoeuvres of the FEN leadership and build the FSU along with other currents. This is a lesson well worth stu-
We are clearly no longer in the period when the trade union movement, through the head to head confrontation between the PS and the PCF, was polarised by the Cold War. The PCF is now going through a major crisis, which poses the question as to whether it will
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the Paris region). • 260 city councillors. • 122 regional councilors. • 23 deputies (out of 527 deputies in the National Assembly. There were 73 out of 486 in 1973).
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DOSSIER
be able to resist - in spite of its reformist underpinnings — the pressures of a rebuilt PS, or whether it will get involved in the process of recomposition and self-definition that has been undertaken
This situation sharply poses questions relating to pluralism and democracy — internal democracy and democracy in relation to mass organisations — and makes them vital requirements not to be treated lightly. In reply to these questions, it is not sufficient — as was seen at the 28th congress — to no longer exclude internal opposition and abandon the notion of democratic centralism (without ever having made a distinction between it and the rather monolithic bureaucratic centralism which the PCF
Heritage
Experience shows that parties claiming the communist heritage — espe cially those who confused communism and Stalinism - have to radically change if they hope to survive. The PCF is no exception. A specific trait of the PCF leadership is that it was at least partially aware of this need, while proving to be reluctant to seriously undertake this change - either through lack of will or inability.
This is the cause of the de facto paralysis of the PCF which, in spite of the Party's public declarations, was confirmed once again at the 28th congress. *
George
Marchais:
PC still smiling after all these years
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International Viewpoint #255 April 1994
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ngres
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DOSSIER
Preparing for the future