100 percent left by Christian Picquet workers, concerned about workplace "rationalisation" and unemployment.
This was the first time in a long time that the far-right has lost votes in a by-election, particularly in their stronghold on the Mediterranean coast.
"we need a mew kind of left unity to beat the right and the far right," LCR spokesperson Alain Krivine told Le Monde on October 18th. "Not unity to repeat the deceptions of the Mitterand years, and not unity behind the application of slightly moderated right wing policies, but lett unity to implement really left, 100% left policies."
"Let's hope that the Communist Party will allow us to repeat this Gardanne experience at a national scale. If only the Socialist Party would recognise the clear lesson of this by-election: in a climate of growing social exasperation, it is no longer electorally successful to propose more "loyal" and "responsible" management of finance-style Europe.
"But rather than hoping for the sudden enlightenment of Socialist Party leaders, we should strive to change the balance of forces on the ground, and within the broader left. In Gardanne, Communist, ecologist, criticalthinking socialists, and far-left socialists have cut a new path, together, on the basis of a few elementary principles, and respecting progressive forces, for the abrogation of the Maastricht treaty."
At the same time, Auchede calls for the *re-birth of the international communist and revolutionary movement, " and invokes the example of the fathers of French Stalinism, Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos. In another text, the neo-Stalinists protest that the party needs "communist self-criticism, but not some consensual self-flagellation, which would plunge the masses into confusion."
The outcome of these debates within the PCF will continue after the 29th Congress. Given the place of the party in the French workers' movement, and its links with significant radical sectors of the working population, the debate will be followed by radicals outside as well as inside the party. * the identity and other engagements of each current. Together, we have begun to articulate a response to the menace of the right, and the way the Socialist Party left has abandoned its principles. In Gardanne, we found the road down which we can and must
Alain Krivine was not the only one enthusiastic about the emergence of a new "radical pole" on the left. In the face of substantial media interest in the theme, even the normally-reticent Communist party leader Robert Hue was obliged to acknowledge an "alternative dynamic, with a particular conception of 'the left", wanting to situate itself on the left, and on concrete issues.
Nevertheless, writing in /Humanité on October 24th, Hue re-stated the Communist Party leadership's reluctance to enter into any broader alliance to the left of social democracy. The General Secretary was less than lukewarm about the creation of what he called "a pole of radicalism which would consist in the unification of a part of the left in order to put pressure on the Socialist Party... tying the left into the whole balance of forces equation."
Surely changing the balance of forces equation on the left is precisely the issue facing those who want to lift the labour movement out of the muddy rut in which it has become stuck as a result of the conversion of so many social democrats to the doctrines of neo-liberalism and the imperatives of the financial markets.*
Lorry drivers block French roads