The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.24           June 28, 1999 
 
 
Communist League In France Holds Founding Convention  

BY MICHEL PRAIRIE
PARIS - The founding convention of the Communist League in France was held in this city May 15-16. The six voting delegates discussed and adopted political and organizational reports, as well as elected an Executive Committee. Fraternal delegates from the Communist Leagues in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom, as well as from the Socialist Workers Party in the United States were seated with voice and consultative vote under the main reports. Several supporters of the communist movement in France also attended the convention as observers.

"The formation of the Communist League in France is the result of a concerted effort initiated in October of last year," said Jean-Louis Sirois in his political report. "At that time a jobs search committee was established in Paris aimed at building concentrations - called fractions - of communist workers in the industrial trade unions organized to do the kind of political work described in Pathfinder's book, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes," the national secretary of the SWP. A collective study of the book was also organized parallel to this effort.

Progress has been made since October, with members of the jobs committee being hired in auto plants in the Paris area, including two in the same plant, as well as in aerospace. As Rafik Benali noted in his organizational report, this was possible because of the jobs committee's steps forward in timeliness and responsiveness to job openings.

"But now," said Sirois in his report, "the Communist League that we are founding is more than a jobs committee. It is a party of workers bolsheviks, whose aim is to build the kind of movement it will take to lead a revolution that can establish a workers and farmers government in France and join the international struggle for socialism.

"It is a party of industrial workers who are members of industrial unions. It functions on a weekly rhythm of political activity. Its organizational principles are based on revolutionary centralism necessary in the deepening class battles at the millennium. Its political milieu is the working class - employed and unemployed, native-born and immigrant, in the city and in the countryside."

French rulers' war at home and abroad
The founding of the Communist League comes at a time when French imperialism is deeply engaged in a deadly war against the working people of Yugoslavia and increased attacks against workers and farmers in France.

The war puts enormous pressures on French imperialism, explained Sirois. Paris is trying to push its own military, diplomatic, and economic interests in a war initiated and led by its U.S. imperialist rivals through the NATO military alliance dominated by Washington. The French government has been among those pushing for a United Nations-brokered "peace" agreement or a "European" intervention force in Kosova as a way to go around NATO. Paris has veto power at the UN Security Council, which it does not have in NATO.

At the time of the founding convention, French president Jacques Chirac had been traveling to Finland and Russia in an effort to win the governments of these countries to the course of Paris in the war. As a way to counter NATO as the dominant military force in Europe, Paris has been a driving force behind the proposal to merge the Western European Union (WEU) - a nominal military alliance of the 11 NATO members who are members of the European Union - with the EU.

The sharpening French-U.S. interimperialist competition is also reflected in the significant trade tensions over everything from bananas to hormone-treated beef.

As they go deeper into war in Yugoslavia, the French capitalists are trying to impose their so-called 35-hour law on working people in France. "This law introduced by the Socialist Party government of Lionel Jospin is a Trojan horse," said Sirois. "It is a cover to generalize what is really greater capitalist `flexibility.' The French capitalists need to drive down working conditions in order to increase the rate of exploitation and to give them a sharper edge in competition with imperialist rivals in Europe and beyond. The 35-hour law allows the employers to spread the work hours over the year, instead of the week as it is now. This means the bosses will try to force workers to put in very long hours during peak production period and less during slower periods without any overtime pay."

The Socialist Party (SP) and Communist Party (CP) together hold a majority in the government, and the law has the support of officials in the main trade union federations, the CFDT and CGT. Nevertheless, the French bosses are meeting unexpected resistance from workers to this "annualization" of hours. There have been a series of strikes and job actions by train drivers and airport workers. In some plants where there had not been struggles in years, especially in private industry, protests have broken out against "flexibility."

"This is a change," said Sirois, "from what we have seen over the last 15 years. Through that period of retreat, workers in private industry have been hit by major job cuts in steel, coal, textile, and chemical industries. Lower wages and temporary jobs have become generalized. Now, our class is regaining confidence and resisting. This is new, even from the 1995 rail-strike and social movement in defense of social security against an attack by the government of then Prime Minister Alain Juppé."

Since the election of an SP government two years ago, the traditional right remains divided in France. As in other imperialist countries, bourgeois politics is marked by the emergence of Bonapartist figures, the main one in France being former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. Pasqua is heading a list for the June European election with Philippe de Villiers, a right-wing politician. Their main slogan is "Left, right, left, right, let's march for France," a militarist and nationalist way to present themselves as above class divisions and against any expansion of powers to the bodies of the European Union.

Sirois concluded his report by stressing that, contrary to what the media and the petty-bourgeois left claim, the recent split in the fascist National Front between its two main leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret, does not mean the end of the fascist danger in France. "Fascist trends are bred by the conditions of the worldwide capitalist depression," said Sirois. "These conditions did not disappear. In fact they are getting deeper and sharper. Economic nationalism - that is the defense of Francés economic interests against its capitalist rivals around the world - is strongly promoted inside the workers movement by union officials and the Socialist and Communist parties. This disarms the working class in the face of the ultraright."

In the discussion, one delegate stated that the 35-hour law represented a concession by the bosses under the pressure of the big labor battles at the end of 1995 and of growing concerns by workers for jobs in the face of a steady high level of unemployment.

Several delegates answered that the current labor resistance to the "flexibility" measures in the 35-hour law remains essentially defensive. The bosses have the initiative, taking advantage of the unemployment, of a real erosion of working and living conditions for working people in France over the last two decades, and of a social democratic government to push through their own agenda.

Delegates adopted unanimously a motion saying that communists are against this 35-hour law, which has nothing to do with a fight to create jobs.

Working-class voice in European vote
The delegates had a substantial discussion on their course in the upcoming June 13 election to the European parliament. The Communist League is prevented by undemocratic laws in France from running its own candidates - a party must run a full slate with dozens of candidates, or none at all. Despite this, delegates decided that they will campaign under their own banner and program against the parties of war, racism, and depression, going to pickets lines, campuses, and other protest actions explaining to fighting workers and revolutionary-minded youth what they would say and do if they had their own candidates. Their effort will include promoting the campaign of Catharina Tirsén, the Communist League candidate in Sweden and the only working-class voice in the European elections.

In that context, the delegates decided to urge workers who intend to cast a vote to express a class position against the bosses' parties in the June elections by voting for the Communist Party or Socialist Party candidates.

After some discussion, the convention delegates rejected calling for a vote for the slate of the centrist organizations Workers Struggle (LO) and the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). The basic difference between the CP and SP on the one hand and the LO and LCR on the other is not their program, despite the more radical sounding rhetoric of the latter. This is illustrated by the fact that in the Yugoslavia war, the most important question in the world today, all these organizations are either overtly supporting French imperialism as part of the French government (SP and CP), adapting to it by calling for a UN- or EU-sponsored imperialist intervention force in Kosova (CP and LCR), or ignoring the war altogether in a workerist, petty-bourgeois nationalist framework (LO).

The key difference between these parties is the fact that the CP and SP, the traditional mass working-class parties, still have strong ties with the main trade union organizations in France, which is not the case with LO and the LCR.

"The petty bourgeois centrist parties are not moving to the left under the pressure of a growing labor upsurge, but more and more to the right, behind their own bourgeoisie," said Sirois.

Involvement in working-class resistance
A special report was presented by Jacques Soulage on his experience in an auto plant where several hundred workers on his shift held a spontaneous walkout against the initial company proposal on the implementation of the 35-hour law in the plant. Soulage was involved in the job action initiated by rank-and-file workers -a vast majority of them nonunionized. The action ended after threats by managers combined with a modified proposal designed to muddy the waters. But out of these initial skirmishes, workers in the factory gained a level of unity and confidence they didn't have for more than 15 years.

The delegates discussed the crucial importance for the Communist League of being part of such resistance when it happens and to learn in practice how to do collective, centralized communist work, as part the vanguard of those who are fighting but not ahead of it. They discussed how officials of the CGT and other trade unions will try to draw in radical workers in this period as cover for their overall inaction in front of the company attack.

In the discussion under Benali's organizational report, the delegates made clear that their priority is to build trade union fractions in the CGT because it is the trade union confederation with the largest concentration and that has the most important base among industrial workers in France.

In this context they decided to build fractions in two different industrial federations that are part of the CGT in the auto industry and in transportation, either rail or at airports.

They also decided to immediately establish a fraction comprised of the two members working in the same auto plant, even if one of them is still working under a temporary contract. The latter has become the common form of probation in industry in France. The fraction goal is to institutionalize collective political work by two communist workers who are in the same plant, one of whom is a CGT member and the other having as his priority being hired in a permanent job allowing him to also become a member of the CGT.

The delegates concretized plans to have a public presence in Paris, including establishing a Pathfinder bookstore, which will also host the current biweekly Militant Labor Forum and the Marxist summer school that the delegates decided to launch around the study of Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes.

The convention delegates also decided to launch an effort aimed at bringing the largest delegation possible of workers and youth to the international Active Workers Conference that will be held in August in Ohio (see ad on page 11).

A Militant Labor Forum titled "Ours is the Epoch of World Revolution" was attended by 28 people on the Saturday evening of the founding congress.

 
 
 
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