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To mark the 40th anniversary of the 1968 revolutionary upsurge in
France, we are reprinting a statement issued June 1, 1968, by the
United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the World Party of
Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.
May 1968 will enter the history of the class struggle as the month of
the biggest revolutionary upsurge yet seen in an industrially developed
capitalist country. Ten million workers on strike, all the big and
medium-sized plants closed down, the most backward and least
politically conscious layers of the proletariat and civil service
employees brought into action, the technicians and foremen widely
involved, the peasants joining the students and workers in the
struggle, broader and broader and more and more militant demonstrations
confronting the harried and increasingly demoralized forces of
repression, a "strong" government out of control of events
and more and more paralyzed for two weeks—this was the picture of
France in this exceptional spring.
The determination of hundreds of thousands of university and
high-school students, of young workers, to bring down the capitalist regime
exploded in such a glaring way that no one seriously questioned what
had happened. The workers, too, demonstrated in just as resounding a
way their determination to battle not only for immediate demands and
against the Gaullist regime but also to overthrow the rule of the
bourgeoisie and capitalism. This determination was expressed in the
occupation of plants, railway stations, power plants, post offices,
over which the red flag was raised. It was expressed in the slogans
calling for "workers power," for "power to the
workers," repeated with increasing frequency in chants and on
banners in the demonstrations. It was expressed by numerous spontaneous
moves to take control or to take over the means of production, by the
moves of committees or collective groups of workers and citizens to
assume power.
Thus, before the eyes of the entire world, a new power was being born,
the power of the future French Socialist Republic, confronting the
decaying Fifth French Republic. It was completely possible during the
week from May 24 to May 30 to draw a general conclusion from these
facts, to cover the country with a network of organs of dual power, to
federate them, to take the necessary initiative to topple the tottering
Gaullist regime and to bring the revolutionary crisis to a conclusion
by the working class taking power in order to build socialism.
If this did not occur, if the bourgeois state was finally able to pick
up the reins of power, this was due exclusively to the betrayal
committed by the leaders of the workers, particularly the leaders of
the French Communist Party [PCF] and the General Federation of Labor
[CGT], who controlled the great majority of workers. These leaders of
the PCF and the CGT did everything possible to isolate the students and
the revolutionary vanguard from the mass of workers, turning the
strikes and factory occupations toward purely economic aims, blocking a
test of strength in the streets where the relationship of forces was
eminently favorable to the revolution, paralyzing the reaction to the
repressive violence, blocking the arming of pickets and the
organization of a student and worker militia, compelling acceptance of
elections offered by a power at bay, and splitting and smothering the
strikes, until their own irresolute attitude and the resolute speech of
de
Gaulle brought about the first pause in the movement.
This betrayal is a consequence of their adherence to the Kremlin’s
doctrine of "peaceful coexistence." The Kremlin views de
Gaulle as weakening the position of American imperialism in Europe, and
the Kremlin is mortally afraid of the perspective of a revolutionary
upsurge in France.
The betrayal is also a consequence of the long years these leaders have
spent in electioneering and the parliamentary routine. The refrain "along
the peaceful and parliamentary road to socialism" was voiced for
years with the excuse that a revolutionary crisis could in no case
occur in France. When such a crisis did actually occur, the same
reformist strategy was used to dissipate the possibility that was
objectively present to take power.
The PCF leadership has lost credit completely with the revolutionary
students; its prestige has been broken by and large among the entire
vanguard of the youth. This liberation of the youth from the bureaucratic
stranglehold has enabled it to enter into action as a new revolutionary
vanguard on a scale never before equalled in France.
But within the working class, the PCF and CGT apparatus, although it
has been shaken many times over the years, and now again when the
workers in the big plants rejected the miserable agreements worked out
with the bosses and the Gaullist government to bring the strike to an
end, still maintains preponderance and has many ways to stifle workers
democracy and free expression of the rank and file will. The scattered
elements for a new leadership, which is ardently desired among the
young workers, are still too weak and unorganized to be able to assure
the building of the organs of dual power on a general scale.
That is why the betrayal committed by the apparatus of the PCF and CGT
was able to save French capitalism once again, as in 1936 and in
1945-47.
But, in contrast to the outcome of the two preceding revolutionary
upsurges in France, the Stalinist betrayal this time was not able to
smash the spring 1968 upsurge outright, nor bring about a rapid
reversal of the relationship of forces. The revolutionary battles of
May 1968 were mounted from bastions like the revolutionary Sorbonne,
forces such as those seeking the right to control the ORTF [Office of
the French Radio and Telephone], and bodies like the committees of
action. The resumption of work in the plants did not liquidate them.
Moreover work was resumed at a much slower rate than the Gaullist
regime and the PCF leadership hoped for. Considerable sections of the
working class in the big plants displayed exemplary militancy and
capacity for resistance.
The bourgeois state could not permit these embryonic forms of dual
power to be consolidated and extended. But it did not have the strength
to eliminate them with a single blow. Thus a transitional period opened
in which the repressive forces are making tests, as in the effort to
break the strike at the Renault plant in Flins through the use of
police. These sallies could become points of departure for resumption
of the revolutionary movement.
In addition, the industrial and economic weakness of French capitalism
does not permit it to grant the considerable material advantages which
it had to accord to the workers in order to assure resumption of work.
Price rises, inflation and unemployment will rapidly erode these gains.
This, in turn, will set off violent responses from workers.
Finally, the internal crisis in the unions and the traditional workers
parties has only begun. This crisis will deepen in coming weeks,
particularly after the elections which the PCF is utilizing as the last
means to reknit its ranks. The repercussions of this crisis will
likewise soon stimulate a powerful resumption of the workers struggle.
All the elements thus exist for forecasting that the dip in temperature
that began May 31 will prove to be only temporary, that new explosions
and new confrontations are absolutely inevitable. Preparations must be
made for these confrontations with maximum lucidity and organization.
All the lessons of the struggles of May 1968 must be drawn in order to
assure assimilation of the gains so that the next wave can begin at a
higher level and make it possible to surmount the insufficiencies of
the first wave.
The first wave revealed the extraordinary weakness of neocapitalism
under the apparent stability of the "consumer society,"
"economic expansion" and the "strong state." The
development of the productive forces, the rise in the level of culture
and technical education of the masses, the deep industrialization of
the country, the explosion in size of the universities, the drop in
average age level of the population— all these changes which the
capitalist regime congratulated itself on as merits and signs of
modernity, turned definitively against it. This was so because under
the capitalist system every development of the productive forces
increases the economic and social contradictions. The masses felt by
instinct that the immense possibilities to satisfy their fundamental
needs were being wasted, cut off or shunted aside under the reign of
profit-making and private property.
The youth no longer took it for granted that there should be close to
1,000,000 unemployed while a workweek of 30 hours for everybody was
clearly in sight. The students, the highly skilled workers, the
technicians, no longer felt obliged to accept the dictates of the
bosses, management, or specialists in the pay of capital on how they
had to work, what they had to produce and what they had to consume. In
the same way the workers have become less and less tolerant of the lack
of rank and file control in their organizations and of the rule of an
authoritarian bureaucracy.
The Fourth International has worked out a transitional program that
corresponds to these essential needs of the masses. This program will
be further elaborated and concretized in the light of what has been
learned from the explosion of May 1968. Some of the elements can be
outlined as follows: the sliding scale of wages; workers control over
production; opening of the bosses’ bookkeeping system; workers control
over hiring and firing; the outlawing of banking secrets; publication
of how all the big companies calculate net costs and profit margins;
registration of the holdings of the landlords; the democratic
elaboration of a plan for the economic development of socialist France
by a Congress of Workers called for this purpose; completely free
medical care, drugs, urban transportation, education and school
supplies; wages for all high-school and university students beginning
at the age of sixteen; administration of the universities by the entire
university community; nationalization of all the big companies, private
banks, and all credit institutions; elimination of all the
representatives of big capital in the administrative boards of the
nationalized enterprises; recasting of the government budget by
eliminating the nuclear armaments program and drastically reducing
military expenses while simultaneously sharply increasing expenditures
for cultural and social equipment (hospitals, low-cost housing,
construction of highways, sports areas and leisure centers).
These planks culminate in the demand for a
workers government based on the representative organizations of the
working class — today the unions, tomorrow democratically elected
committees. Unquestionably this demand is equivalent in the immediate
future to calling on the big workers parties, in association with the
unions, to take power; they still enjoy the support in actuality of the
majority of the working class. But these parties show no desire
whatsoever to take the road to winning power through extraparliamentary
means. The deeper and more extensive the revolutionary crisis becomes,
the more these traditional parties will be outflanked by the masses and
the more the slogan of a workers government will acquire for them the
meaning of the workers themselves, organized in committees, taking
power.
To promote and to inspire the revolutionary activity of the masses
along the road of resuming the struggle of May 1968, the first task is
to reinforce the revolutionary vanguard. This must be carried out on
several levels, among others the broad vanguard, by force of
circumstances regrouping diverse tendencies and organizations around
solid unity in action based on precise common revolutionary objectives
and observance of workers democracy.
On another level, the revolutionary Marxists themselves must seek to
move as rapidly as possible toward the building of a revolutionary
party, which already has a hearing among the masses. The United
Secretariat of the Fourth International points to the admirable way in
which the members of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire
[Revolutionary Communist Youth] and the Parti Communiste
Internationaliste, the French section of the Fourth International, have
met the test of May 1968. We express our conviction that they will play
a capital role in carrying out this double task, without which the
French socialist revolution cannot win.
The revolutionary process in France is of supreme importance to the
entire world and to the forward march of the world revolution. May 1968
released the brakes on the political situation throughout Europe,
bringing the student struggles to a higher level in Italy, Spain, Great
Britain, Belgium, and Sweden, stimulating the resumption of the workers
struggles in various countries, unleashing the process of the European
revolution. ... But the primary importance of the May 1968 movement was
to bring the proletariat of a highly industrialized country into the
center of the world revolution for the first time in more than 20
years. This fact has already swept away a whole series of prejudices,
of false conceptions, of revisions of Marxism fostered by the subsiding
of the European revolution after 1948.
It has cleansed the atmosphere by raising the demand for 100 percent
workers democracy from the very beginning of the revolutionary upsurge.
It has assured the present phase of the world revolution a higher
political and theoretical level than in the past, a revival of the best
traditions of the revolutionary, internationalist workers movement.
On this foundation it has created conditions propitious for a rapid
development of the international Trotskyist movement and the Fourth
International to which the revolutionary Marxist militants are duty
bound to respond at once in view of the completely new possibilities
which have now been opened up.
Long live the French
socialist revolution!
Long live the world socialist revolution!
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