France: May 2008
The recent upsurge in militancy by French workers
and students has accompanied big defeats for president Sarkozy in local
elections. Votes for the radical left held up well, again providing the
platform for launching a new mass workers’ party. The need for united
working-class industrial and political struggle, echoing 1968, could not
be more pressing. ALEXANDRE ROUILLARD (Gauche Révolutionnaire – CWI
France) reports.
THE SARKOZY-FILLON government has suffered a major
defeat in council and departement elections. This shows an important
rejection of their policies. But this electoral defeat is not enough to
stop the attacks of president Nicolas Sarkozy. Neither the official
‘left’ nor the main trade union leaders want to build a real opposition.
Numerous workers’ struggles are left isolated and the proposals of the
Parti Socialiste (PS) differ only in form from those of Sarkozy.
It is left to the workers and youth themselves to
construct real opposition to the policies of Sarkozy and defend their
own demands. A united struggle is more than necessary to defend wages,
jobs and pensions; and to fight against privatisation and the numerous
measures against the youth, the poor and immigrants. In that context the
construction of a new workers’ and youth party to struggle against
Sarkozy and capitalism is a central question.
While Sarkozy is flaunting his connections with his
rich friends, inviting ministers and family members on luxury holidays,
the daily lives of the majority of the population continues to worsen.
The next measures to be announced by François Fillon, the prime
minister, will again consist of new attacks. The justification of the
government will be that economic growth will be lower than predicted.
However, all the economists warned that the government’s predictions for
growth in the autumn of 2007 were too optimistic. As a matter of fact,
the plan of the government was to launch a first wave of attacks and
then wait until after the local elections to announce extra measures. Of
all the election promises only those which promised gifts to the bosses
have been kept.
The risk of an economic recession in the USA and the
consequences that this will have for the world economy will bring
enormous social damage for millions when thousands lose their jobs and
are faced with increasing misery. The measures envisaged by Sarkozy will
allow the bosses to heighten the exploitation of workers.
The government had already announced the suppression
of thousands of public service jobs at the end of 2007; amongst others,
11,200 teaching jobs are set to go. ‘Reforms’ of public services have
been accelerated (like the fusion of job centres, ANPE, with benefit
offices, Unedic). Preparations are being made for a future privatisation
of the universities with the Pécresse law which will strengthen
university ‘autonomy’, and thus dependency on private companies and
increased competition between universities.
The government is preparing a new austerity plan –
‘savings’, it likes to call it – of between €6-7 billion, according to
the newspaper, Le Monde. The minister of finance has announced that the
government needs to cut €5 billion a year in social security and another
€5 billion a year in state spending. This while fiscal measures in
favour of the bosses from July 2007 amount to €15 billion each year. It
is not hard to see where the money is going. Once more the method will
be to take money from the workers to give to the rich, to cut thousands
of workplaces and to reorganise public services from the level of the
departements to the much larger, more remote regions.
There are also plans to continue with attacks on
pensions, with a retreat to working 41 years before people are entitled
to a full pension. Last year, pension entitlement had been pushed back
to 40 years. If there are no massive struggles in defence of pension
rights, this will be quickly followed by a ruling limiting pension
rights to those who have worked for 42 years.
In the next few weeks we will see the validation of
the agreement on the new labour contract, which includes making it
easier to make people redundant, and lengthening the trial period before
employing new people. This agreement has, disgracefully, been signed by
almost all the trade union federations, and those which did not sign did
not lift a finger to organise the struggle against it. This new labour
code will also introduce a new sort of work contract, for a determined
period of time (Contrat duré determiné, CDD) that can last as long as
three years, after which the employers can sack people freely. This
contract will increase the level of exploitation for workers. Other
measures will be announced to ‘flexibilise’ the contracts for civil
servants and introduce cost-effective requirements. To put it
differently, public services will have to be as cost-effective as
possible; they will have to provide the minimum of service with the
minimum of quality.
Different struggles developing
THOUSANDS OF SCHOOL students are struggling against
the axing of jobs. The same is happening in primary schools and
childcare centres. Several thousand school students have demonstrated at
different times in Paris and other cities. They were also protesting
against the disappearance of the Brevet d’Enseignement Professionnel (BEP,
which took two years and acted as the first diploma for skilled
industrial workers). Discontinuing the BEP will oblige many school
students to choose between a Bac professionnel (crammed into three years
instead of four) or to begin working immediately without a real degree
and thus for lower wages.
The Sarkozy-Fillon policies (and those of preceding
governments) will result in a worsening education for the great majority
of young people. Oversized classes and fewer resources will advance the
inequalities already existing in education. Only a small elite will
receive good quality teaching. This is what the government wants, a
system that churns out a maximum of people with a minimum of education
who can fill the vacancies for unskilled and super-exploited labour.
Simultaneously, a lot of other strikes have been
developing. Workers in the private sector are struggling against factory
closures or redundancy plans, with the strikes at Kleber, Miko and
Arcelor-Mittal amongst the most well-known.
These redundancies are planned in multinationals
that have made billions of profits in 2007. In the last couple of months
there have also been strikes to demand more wages. On 1 February, 80% of
workers in shops and supermarkets went on strike. In Carrefour, the big
supermarket chain, workers won a victory when management was obliged to
offer full-time contracts to all workers who asked for one (40% of the
check-out staff work part-time on demand of the company, working 30
hours a week instead of 35 which means they receive €200 a month less).
But these strikes and struggles get almost no
support from the trade union leadership. The school students who are
fighting against the redundancies of their teachers, or against the end
of the BEP, were abandoned. Just like the private-sector workers when
faced with redundancies or in their struggle for better wages, and those
in the public sector against workplace closures. Every weekday we see a
different individual strike while it is the government’s whole policy
which has to be fought. The school students will not be able to win
without the workers. We need to construct a real strike which brings
together the youth with workers from private and public sectors against
the policies of Sarkozy and the attacks from the employers. We have to
demand this of the trade unions while being prepared to participate in
struggles without waiting and look to spread them to other sectors.
Sarkozy’s electoral defeat
WITH ABOUT 47% of the vote in the March local
elections for the ‘left’ against 41% for the right, this was a real
defeat for the right. The defeat was a protest against the policies of
the government even if local elements accentuated or diminished that
tendency. People who believed the electoral promises of Sarkozy have
been enraged to discover that it was all a lie, and have inflicted
severe damage on the Fillon-Sarkozy tandem. This government has not got
real support in society and has accumulated against it enormous social
rage.
There has been a disintegration of the electoral
base which elected Sarkozy. This base is very volatile, as we stated
last year. The train drivers’ strikes last autumn were the first blow
against the government and proved that it was possible to resist.
The right wing lost the election in the majority of
the big cities. It held on to Bordeaux, Le Havre, Marseille and Nice. It
lost control over Toulouse, Strasbourg, Amiens, Rouen, Caen and many
other cities. In most cases, Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire
(UMP) suffered from numerous divisions locally. This also shows that
Sarkozy is not able to manage things. As long as he was useful to win
elections he was on centre stage but now he has become a liability.
Sarkozy had announced that the elections would be a national test and he
was counting on leading the campaign himself. But in the end he
completely disappeared during the last weeks of campaigning. The
majority of UMP candidates hid references to the UMP from their election
material and asked Sarkozy not to intervene, while pretending that what
was at stake were purely local issues.
No real opposition
THE ESTABLISHMENT ‘LEFT’ succeeded in obtaining an
important victory. The PS had no problem holding on to cities like Paris
or Lyon. It also succeeded in reconquering its position in many of the
suburbs around the big cities, as well as in the smaller cities.
However, it was only in a limited number (for example Lille and Rouen)
that the PS beat the right by a large margin. In general, victories for
the PS were with a margin of a few hundred votes. The vote for the PS
and its allies was more a tactical vote to defeat Sarkozy than one
expressing support for PS policies. Moreover, the level of abstention
stayed very high (the highest since 1959), especially in working-class
districts.
Nobody is taken in by the comical games the PS
leaders engage in. A recent opinion poll, published by Valeurs Actuelles,
showed a new fall in the popularity of Sarkozy. Only 30% of those polled
are happy with his policies. Yet only 24% think that the PS would be
better, and 51% think that the PS would deliver the same policies.
We understand why: the PS does not question
capitalism, and does not defend the workers. On the issue of falling
purchasing power, PS leader, François Hollande, does not propose any
general measures to increase wages, he only suggests helping the minimum
wage to catch up with inflation. The PS does not propose to take on the
main cause of falling purchasing power: the capitalist offensive to
raise profits and lower wages.
Hollande does not question the $30 billion of help
to industry, he only wants to redefine some of the conditions for its
allocation. The PS was in favour of the attack on the train drivers’
pensions, as it is ready to accept that people will need to work 41
years before they can retire on a full pension. The central theme in the
debates in the PS is how to transform the party into a US-style
Democratic Party, openly in favour of capitalism.
Sarkozy has no reason to be worried: the PS will
play at opposition but nothing more. And the trade union leaders who
could call for major days of strikes in defence of wages, against
redundancies and workplace shut downs, against privatisation and pension
fund attacks, do not do it. It is down to the workers who are at present
involved in struggle, and the school students, to defend this
perspective. It is the only means to construct a movement which can
unify the workers and the youth which can stop Sarkozy.
It is the ‘abstention party’ which once more was the
principal winner in the working-class districts. This shows the urgency
and necessity of a new workers’ party that can provide a true expression
to those who have had enough of these policies and this system.
The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) participated in
a few places on the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) list. In the
majority of cases, however, the PCF made its alliance with the PS –
almost everywhere in the second round, except where the PS threatened to
take a mayor or a departement over from the PCF. The results for the PCF
are a slight retreat (-1% according to the PCF’s National Committee,
quoted in Le Monde). The PCF has got the majority in an additional five
towns of over 9,000 inhabitants than in 2001 (91 against 86). But if you
look more widely, it also lost the majority in ten towns of over 3,500
inhabitants (l80 against 190 previously). It has equally lost ten
departement councillors. It retook Dieppe but lost Calais, Aubervilliers,
Montreuil and the mayor of the 8th district of Marseille. It retook the
general council of Allier but lost that of Seine Saint-Denis,
historically controlled by the PCF. In some places the PCF has
re-knotted the tie with its workers’ electorate but, in general, it has
not been able to distinguish itself from the PS in the majority of
places. This is unsurprising as the PCF did not criticise PS policies.
The PCF was invisible when it presented itself
behind the PS. The repeated alliances with the PS and the acceptance of
the PS programme have alienated the working-class and popular
electorate. In numerous places the PS accepted an alliance with the
centre forces of Modem (liberal democrats) without any criticism from
the PCF. That is without talking about the places where the PCF is in
the majority and accepts the privatisation of local services. The PS won
in a number of big cities by courting the middle-class vote. The latter
is more reluctant to vote for the ‘left’ with a PCF candidate heading
the list.
The anti-capitalist lists
LUTTE OUVRIÈRE (LO) also stood, with 36 people
elected after the first round. Fifteen of them were elected on LO lists.
The other 21 were on lists of the ‘united left’, with the PS, PCF and
Greens in the first round. This tactic is astonishing, to say the least.
The anti-democratic election legislation can oblige
parties to participate on unity lists in the second round, because a
party can only compete in the second round if it has polled more than
10% in the first round. If a clearly independent political position is
maintained, it would be possible under certain circumstances to
participate on such unity lists, and working-class people could
understand this approach. But in the first round? Furthermore, in some
cities, LO declared that its elected councillors would vote in favour of
budgets drawn up by the PS majority. Will LO councillors follow these
instructions or will they refuse to vote for budgets that mean more
social cuts and the privatisation of public services?
The votes for the radical left, specifically for the
LCR, were good. A layer of workers are determined to vote for candidates
who struggle against this system. However, it is difficult to work out
what the real political basis is of this vote as most LCR candidates
stood on lists which were alliances with other forces. Indeed, the LCR’s
best results came from such lists, the party not doing quite so well
when it presented itself on its own. In a good deal of cities where the
LCR list had councillors elected, the LCR list united local or national
forces amongst whom many are not in favour of the construction of a new
anti-capitalist party.
The lists presented or supported by the LCR had 70
people elected in the first round. The second round confirmed the good
score and in some places LCR polled more, like in Clermont Ferrand. The
scores of the LCR lists were between 2% and 15%. The programme on which
these lists stood was variable from town to town. Some lists spoke about
the need to launch a new workers’ party, others did not. The formation
of committees for a new party before the elections had not happened
except in a few places, such as Marseille and Toulouse. Even here they
have not taken on real life. It is urgent that we make up for that
delay.
The discussions in the ‘initiating committees for a
new anti-capitalist party’ continue. In certain places there is a little
progress. Public meetings have taken place and, sometimes, the
committees have been able to organise regular work. The problem is in
knowing which direction the debate is developing in. The committees can
of themselves only develop to a certain stage; the regroupment of a
number of activists open to discuss different subjects and raise certain
demands of an anti-capitalist programme.
To be built a party needs a more dynamic beginning,
one that does not look to force the rhythm but is not too slow either.
The dispersal of the movement in little local committees without any
regional or national structure means that the LCR can control things
nationally and decide when national meetings take place. Many of the
participants on a local level would be in favour of a more structured
approach. Nothing has been foreseen to go down that route in the next
few months. This is urgent. The attacks of Sarkozy will continue and
speed up while the struggles which are taking place need an instrument
to discuss tactics and perspectives.
The new party must build itself amongst the workers,
including the youth, unemployed, pensioners, etc, with a programme in
defence of workers’ rights and conditions, and against specific
oppression (sexism, racism, etc). That is its central objective. It will
be built only when it is an instrument in the struggle of the workers
and, at the same time, can be a space to discuss the only real
alternative to capitalism, ie socialism.
In this context a united struggle is necessary
against the policies of Sarkozy. With the threat of an economic crisis,
it is necessary to accelerate this process, to construct real activist
committees for a new party of struggle against Sarkozy and against
capitalism.
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