December 19, 2007

Pave: The Future Of Futureless French Communism

Le jour 218 de Sarko

Reporting on Communism in France -- that a Western democracy is still fielding Communists is, well, both astonishing and bewildering -- reporting on the doings of French Communists puts us in mind of the natural history of the amœba: both have a drifty sort of existence, no definite destination, are ruthlessly voracious, and cannot scale without splitting off into smaller independent cells. [Pause.] Yet, even teeny amœbae and Communists hold fascinations for the bigger world beyond. [We squint.]

121807_commie_amoeba.png
FRENCH COMMIE CELL
Fission And Spread The Revolution

France fields not one but several (!) Communist parties:

There is little congeniality among these various parties. And long gone are the days of Soviet mandated collegiality.

After throwing in with Stalin, who had thrown in with Hitler in 1939 (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), French Commies sat out or sabotaged the early French war effort. They resurfaced as reinvented patriots after Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Unternehmen Barbarossa, 06.22.41), almost a full year after the German occupation of their native France (06.25.40). Not surprisingly, the heyday of French Communism was coincident with the heyday of Soviet Communism and continued to track with the fortunes of its Soviet exemplar, declining into the present.

French Commies have fallen on hard times. They have not been a double-digit force at the national polls since Georges Marchais (1981: 4e/10 = 15.3%). Today they express themselves politically through the French unions. But express what? Failing unions' perfunctory discontent? French Communism is a mess -- organizationally, programmatically, polemically, demagogically. The folk at the World Socialist Web Site are disgusted -- and not a little baffled by it all.

SOCIALIST PARTY, “FAR LEFT” MOVE
TOWARDS ELECTORAL ALLIANCE

December 13, 2007 (WSWS) - Henri Weber—a top PS [Parti Socialiste] official and former co-founder of the LCR with Alain Krivine—told a December 7 meeting of top PS and LCR officials at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris:
We must become, we can become a party with 35 percent [of the popular vote], like in most countries of Europe.

... Since its August summer school at Port-Leucate, the LCR has been trying to form a unified left party into which it could liquidate itself, while mounting a campaign to promote the South American guerilla Che Guevara among French youth [also see this]. The new party would no longer claim association with Trotskyism. Precisely because it is junking its former pretensions to Marxism, however, the LCR has felt obliged to (altogether falsely) claim substantial political independence from the PS.

In an August 24 interview in Le Parisien, titled “The LCR has no more reason to exist,” Besancenot made clear that he saw the new party as a potential ruling party of the French bourgeois state:

Let’s be clear: we’re not afraid of power. But it can also make us dizzy! We want no parliamentary or ministerial accords with a social-liberal party like the PS. This political independence is a sign of liberty. And it’s been rather well rewarded in recent elections...it doesn’t prevent a common resistance faced with the right.

LO, on the other hand, recently announced that it would post joint candidate lists with the PS and other Plural Left parties in cities across France. ... LO has refused to join the LCR’s new catch-all party, prompting a rather comical spat. LO improbably explained its refusal to participate by claiming that it refused to abandon the perspective of a “Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyist party”—a point to which the December 6 edition of the LCR’s Rouge newspaper responded by ironically noting that LO’s supposed principles prevented it from allying with the LCR, but apparently did not prevent it from running with the PS. ... Claiming that LO could join the LCR’s new party without compromising its independence, the LCR wrote:

We hope to manage to regroup organisations, militant groups, even former members of the PCF. This means the right to freely organise tendencies or even factions.

Huh? [Pause.] Are we mistaken, that sounds exactly like today's fractious French Commies.

Things are equally a mess at the PCF.

FRENCH COMMUNISTS GIVE THEMSELVES
ONE YEAR TO PREPARE CHANGES

December 19, 2007 (L'Humanité) - “We’ve got one year, just one year to make a splash, to surprise people. We’ve got one year to match our doubts and our certainties with today’s world.” Those words, pronounced by Marie-George Buffet as she closed the general assembly of party section delegates, which was held on December 8-9 in downtown Paris, were an exact expression of the mood that the 1500 communist activists were in.

... “The question is whether the French Communist Party can survive,” “an existential crisis,” “a crisis of confidence,” “why are we in such a situation?” Reacting to the words of each speaker, the party activists focused on overcoming the feeling of helplessness caused by the calamitous presidential election results. “One point nine two percent – with such a vote, a party no longer counts in political life. It loses its credibility among the workers,” one delegate remarked. The communists intend to arrive at a diagnosis and to apply the right remedies. To begin with, as was underlined in the assignment for the party congress, which is to be held in one year, it will be necessary “to draw lessons from our failures and to undertake a thorough-going transformation of our concepts, organizational structure, and practices.”

... “The play of political tendencies is paralyzing our leadership,” declared Patrice Bessac, the leader of the Party organization in Paris. Criticism was also expressed regarding the activities of the PCF over the past few years: the weakening of the rank-and-file organizations (the party cells) which have stretched, in many places to the breaking point, their links with the French people, the steady reduction of activity by communists in their places of work, and the absence of any real political or ideological training of the membership.

... But every delegate agreed that the organization’s failings reflect the lack of a clear, credible and mobilizing project for French society. Lionel Chabert, a Paris delegate, outlined the French political scene: On the one hand, Olivier Besancenot, who represents an appealing dissident but impotent political current, and on the other hand a Socialist Party which looks to the center-right Modem party. “But,” he deplored, “there is no big popular left-wing formation capable of making changes.” In the course of a round-table discussion, another activist offered this observation: “Activism feeds on a project in which you can invest for the long term, and on struggles that show fast results.” Communism is at the heart of this question. All of the delegates agreed that it remains relevant, but according to Jean-Marie Doussin, the secretary for the Seine-Saint-Denis organization, “it doesn’t go without saying that communism means the same thing to everybody.” Marie-George Buffet argued for “a communist vision freed from governmental and productivist considerations, a vision that can go beyond the mould of 1920.” She added: “Neither a sweet dream continually deferred, nor a past composed of crimes and disillusionment, but a road to get beyond capitalism and to free men and women from all forms of domination.”

Yes, well, whatever that means.

Here is the question we would pose, does Communism have a future where the exploited working class has become -- is, in fact -- the detested middle class?

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* Complete 1e tour results here.

PFFT (What is this?): French Commie confusion 4½ | Rayonnement français 0

Posted by Damian at December 19, 2007 11:30 PM
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