The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.24           June 23, 1997 
 
 
Celebrate Workers' Blow To French Rulers' Plans  
The results of the parliamentary elections in France give working people around the world cause to celebrate. The vote was a sharp reminder that the capitalist rulers have failed to convince working people to accept the idea that they "need to sacrifice" more for the sake of capital. This isn't just true in France - recent elections in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Iran also registered widespread resistance to capitalist austerity.

In order to reverse the long-term decline in their rate of profits, the bosses in France - like in every other capitalist nation - need to drive down workers' wages, social benefits, and working conditions. That's what President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé attempted to do over the last two years. But they ran into a problem - stiff resistance by the working class.

Workers in France are stronger today because of their own actions. In response to the "Juppé plan" of austerity at a time of record unemployment, they took to the streets in several waves of strikes and protest actions in 1995-96. These battles ended in a standoff. Chirac and Juppé failed in their attempt to either finesse or force workers to accept the slashing of their social wage, supposedly needed for Paris to meet the criteria for entering the European Monetary Union (EMU).

With support for Chirac's Gaullist coalition slipping, a layer in the French ruling class decided to take a gamble on early elections, hoping to at least hang onto a majority in parliament for the next five years and use its as a carte- blanche for further assaults on labor. But working people said, "We've had enough."

Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin and his coalition partners in the Stalinist Communist Party of France have a thoroughly bourgeois program - like Francois Mitterrand and other social democratic regimes before him did. But Jospin will head a government that was elected on promises of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The workers who just voted out the Juppé government will be watching closely, and are more confident to keep pressing their demands, including with more strikes and street actions.

This ends the prospect of maintaining a strong franc. Paris has tried to keep the French currency strong to maintain its slot in the imperialist pecking order, even at the cost of high unemployment. The working class has replied, "We don't care about your currency - we need jobs." Working people are now likely to push Jospin in the direction of allowing a weaker franc in an attempt to boost exports and employment. Such policies, under the current conditions of a world depression and stiff interimperialist competition, will push inflation upwards.

Without a strong franc, the ability of the French rulers to put forward their "Gaullist model" as the capitalist alternative to Washington's domination in Europe will diminish. This is what Chirac had been trying to do both through pushing for the franc to become the currency the EMU could revolve around and for Paris to take over NATO's southern command or build an alternative imperialist military alliance in Europe.

Every week, though, the idea of monetary union built around the German mark or the French franc, with a strong common currency able to compete with the dollar, is more exposed for the pipe dream that it is. In addition to Chirac's woes, Bonn has been wracked by the German regime's scheme to revalue its gold stock to solve its budget deficit problem with a stroke of the pen! In Germany, too, the rulers have been scared off from pushing social cuts by the resistance of the working class and their inability to reimpose capitalist social relations in the eastern part of the country. This makes the entire imperialist edifice more shaky.

Working people should celebrate the weakened position of these imperialist masters. Their disputes over "monetary union" and military alliances are about how to best take on workers at home; drive toward overturning the workers states in Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere; and beat out their capitalist rivals. The toilers have no common interests with "their" bourgeoisie on these questions - in France or anywhere else.

The French vote also showed a growing polarization, with Jean-Marie Le Pen's fascist National Front receiving its largest vote ever. This is not unique to France either. Under the impact of a world economic crisis ultrarightist and reactionary forces get a bigger hearing, including the Reform Party in Canada, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in Australia, and Patrick Buchanan in the United States. At the same time, growing numbers of workers and young people turn out to protest when these rightists speak.

The elections in France make clear there's a real desire and resolve among working people to resist the capitalist rulers' austerity drive. This provides more openings for revolutionaries to join small skirmishes and bigger social protest actions, fight shoulder to shoulder with fellow workers for immediate demands, and in the course of these battles explain to others that what workers want - jobs, social equality, an end to racism and sexism - are not possible under the capitalist system.

There's more space today to present and win a hearing for a working-class, a socialist course. There's more space to explain that the labor movement needs a program that advances the unity of workers and their allies, such as working farmers, in order to push back the rulers' offensive and give an effective answer to the ultraright.

This includes fighting for jobs for all - for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay and public works programs to build needed housing and infrastructure and create more jobs. It includes demanding affirmative action and equal rights for all immigrants, an end to the deportations and victimizations supported by all of the capitalist parties. It includes opposition to entry by any country into the European Union, NATO or any other imperialist institution. And it includes international solidarity - demanding all French and other imperialist troops get out of Africa, Albania, and Yugoslavia.

Class-struggle minded workers in every country should recognize and celebrate the greater possibilities to advance such a program today.  
 
 
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