June 13, 2007
Pave: Busted Commies
Once upon a time the Parti communiste français (PCF) was powerful and feared. The PCF was not a party beholden to Communist principles, it was a serviceable (scil., pliable and reliable) Western agent of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union in turn served as the PCF's sponsor and loan officer.
In the mid-1930s, as France cringed before the prospect of war with Germany, Maurice Thorez, party-line Stalinist and longstanding PCF secretary general, instructed the membership:
"We ask our followers to penetrate into the army and fulfill the task of the working-class by disrupting the army."*
In 1939 with France at war with Germany, the PCF sided with the Soviets who at the time were sided with Germany. Of course, when Hitler double-crossed Uncle Joe, the PCF stopped sabotaging French armaments** and became good French patriots as well as good Soviet patriots.
After WWII, the PCF emerged as the largest political party in France. It went on to support the Soviet's violent suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan -- really, anything the Soviet Union did.*** And as the Soviet Union prospered, so did the PCF, which is to say it didn't.
Here is a thumbnail of the PCF's political fortunes in showcase presidential elections since 1969.
- 1969: Jacques Duclos: 1er tour, 3e/7 = 21.3%
- 1974: Did not field a candidate, supported François Mitterrand, who went on to lose to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 2e tour.
- 1981: Georges Marchais: 1er tour, 4e/10 = 15.3%
- 1988: André Lajoinie: 1er tour, 5e/9 = 6.8%†
- 1995: Robert Hue: 1er tour, 5e/9 = 8.7%
- 2002: Robert Hue: 1er tour, 11e/16 = 3.4%
- 2007: Marie-George Buffet: 1e tour, 7e/12 = 1.9%
With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the PCF found itself orphaned. It tried reinventing itself as nice Communism, chummied up with the Socialists and later the Greens. This won the PCF few new members and further disaffected its base, which preferred its Communism straight and dirigiste.
And now, now the Commies are broke.
CASH-STRAPPED COMMUNISTS HAWK TREASURES
PARIS June 10, 2007 (Telegraph) - In the "catastrophic" election campaign, party leader Marie-George Buffet ran up a £3.7 million bill that yielded less than two per cent of the votes. Under France's complex system of political funding, the collapse of support meant only £550,000 was reimbursed by the state, rather than the £5.4 million the party would have received had it won at least five per cent of the national vote.It could get worse. Opinion polls predict Mr Sarkozy's party will take between 400 and 460 of the 577 seats in the Assemblée Nationale. The opposition Socialist Party, which is in disarray, is praying for a "symbolic" minimum of 120 seats.
That would leave the Communists on the brink of disaster, with predictions that they will hold as few as four of their current 21 seats in the parliamentary elections, thus losing the privileges and funding given to official parliamentary groups, which need at least 20 MPs to receive public cash.
... Now the party has been forced to admit things are "seriously tight", after claims that it plans to sell the family silver, including its emblematic Paris headquarters - a listed building designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer - and valuable art including Mona Lisa with Moustache by Marcel Duchamp.‡
LA (UNCLE) JOE-CONDE
That Enigmatic Commie Smile
... The party's 90,000 members pay about £4 million in dues every year, said [Jean-Louis Frostin, the party treasurer], who admitted that cuts were planned to the 55 full-time staff.... The Communists built a property portfolio thanks to decades of funding from Moscow which, until 1990, was estimated to have sent about £1 million a year. Much has since been sold, but the party still owns several apartments, including one used by Lenin during a visit to Paris.
[Hat tip: Andy]
Ho, that is rich. Communists speculating in real estate.
Here's an idea. Why not ask the PCF members to consign all their earthly belongings to the party? You know, as a matter of Communist principle.
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* Alistair Horne, To Lose A Battle (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1969), 75.
** William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 484.
Horne, To Lose A Battle, 114.
*** However, the PCF maintained its French credentials by supporting the French imperialist position during the Indochina War (1947-54) and the Algerian War (1954-62).
† Does not include splinter candidate Pierre Juquin, who managed 2.1% of the vote in the 1e tour.
‡ The Telegraph has here invented a polite new name for this Duchamp "rectified readymade". The actual title is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), which when pronounced approximates "elle a chaud au cul" ("She has a hot ass"). It should be made clear, as the Telegraph does not, that Marcel Duchamp was never a Communist, nor did he donate the L.H.O.O.Q. to the PCF, as he had sold it to Patricia Matta.
PFFT (What is this?): Comrade, can you spare a sou? 3 | Rayonnement français 0
Posted by Damian at June 13, 2007 06:00 AMYes, the old plot of rooting for the downfall of the existing government in order for your party to gain more power is, indeed, an old ploy of the commies. They call this tactic revolutionary defeatism. You can go back further to see this defeatist attitude - after Waterloo, when Carnot was about the only one in Paris who did not become a defeatist, Thiers and Jules Favre in 1870, WWI, when Louis Malvy (Minister of the Interior) let the Bolshevist leader Trotzky run a defeatist campaign in France for two years – I won't even mention Caillaux!
From the July 20, 1918, edition of the New York Times reporting on the trial of Malvy:
"…concerned chiefly the defeatist agitation carried on without a letup or hindrance all over France by the avowed anarchists and sedition mongers during 1915 and 1916." They used strikes and anti-war propaganda in an attempt to weaken the French government – because they felt the power should belong to the proletariat.
Lenin said it was the duty of the proletariat "who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie." In 1914 he wrote The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European War with this advice to his followers: "Take your rifles and turn them against your officers and against all capitalists."
June 12 President Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial here in DC. The "Goddess of Democracy" statue is at Mass and NJ for anyone visiting my fair city.
The Washington Times ran an editorial on "Europeans' flight from Europe" stating: European welfare systems are redistribution mechanisms, taking money from skilled and educated Europeans in order to give it to nonskilled newcomers from the Third World." This, they argue, has chased thousands of skilled, and educated workers out of countries like France.
Now, I wonder if this also is a reason for the demise of the communists in France. As the aging hippies from the 60's die off, or no longer want to be involved with these organizations, and as the youth leave, there is no one left to join them. And, after all, these "redistribution mechanisms" are the mainstay of communism, and, all can see that it just doesn’t work.
William Shirer's book is very good.
Sorry, went on way too long, but the baseball game I'm listening to went into extra innings….
Didn't also Le Pen get busted? National Front got 4.3 percent and from the article in Washington Times:
"The party is also facing financial ruin, as its poor parliamentary score means the annual $6.1 million state funding it has received over the past five years will be cut by two-thirds." And I bet they don't have a single painting to sell!
My question is this: Will Len Pen's demise help those who wish to pass the EU constitution? I think his followers were against the constitution…
First, another striking quote from Maurice Thorez, 1934:
We [scil., French Communists] are against national defense. We are supporters of Lenin, of revolutionary defeatism.
Shirer, Collapse, 234.
As for the EU Constitution, what Constitution? The first submission is no longer viable by the rules of ratification. No one can much agree on what a second throw should be, though everyone seems agreed on something leaner, something actually resembling an establishing instrument. See our earlier post. Any new Constitution is sure to reconfigure the OUI and NON alliances.
As for the FN, it surfaced briefly in 2002 as a political force, but is now little more than the fading personality cult of the faded M. Le Pen. Had M. Le Pen turned over the reins to his daughter Marine earlier, the FN might have had a more formidable -- and baleful -- impact in the recent elections. The daughter is clever, the father is not. As it is the FN is spent. And deprived of state funding, it is spent and busted. For now.
Political ruin and resurrection only being a headline apart.
DGB
Posted by: Damian at June 14, 2007 05:13 AM
