BY ROLLANDE GIRARD
PARIS - "This is the war of some Serbs, but it is not
our war," said a Serbian now living and working in Paris.
He had stopped by a literature table set up by an
international team of socialist workers and youth who are
on a campaign here to sell hundreds of copies of the
Marxist magazine Nouvelle Internationale.
A French student gave a different view. "It's too bad you're saying this about Yugoslavia," he said, referring to the sign on the table that read, "No to French and NATO troops in Yugoslavia."
"My brother is over there and I believe he saved a lot of people's lives," the student said.
From December 16 to January 8 the international team of volunteers has sold 269 copies of Nouvelle Internationale. The best-seller in this series has been issue no. 5 with the articles "Imperialism's march toward fascism and war" by Jack Barnes and "Defending Cuba, defending Cuba's socialist revolution" by Mary-Alice Waters. Some 165 copies of this issue have been sold.
The volunteer salespeople from abroad came to France during the strikes and mass actions in December against the onslaught on social security by the Alain Juppé government. This mass movement, which forced the government to retreat, ebbed just before the holidays. At the same time, the battles of November and December continue to generate broad political discussions among workers and youth that show working people gained self- confidence through their victorious struggle.
The international team has regularly set up tables with Pathfinder books, the Militant, and Perspectiva Mundial on campuses and street corners in Paris. The signs on the tables read, "No to the Juppé plan," "France, NATO out of Yugoslavia," and "Defend the socialist revolution in Cuba."
At one of the tables on a busy street corner, a young high school woman came by and asked the socialist workers their opinion about Yugoslavia. After listening carefully, she said, "I agree. I'm Serb. I've lived here for 13 years but I go visit my family. They tell me `Nobody asked us if we wanted a war,' because they sure didn't want it." Her family had lived together with Muslims and Croats without any problems before, she explained.
At the Jussieu campus, Bauchera, a student opposed to the imperialist war drive against Yugoslavia, was happy to meet someone who had the same ideas she did. Her friends didn't agree with her, she said.
Differing views on Cuban revolution
The international team has also gotten into ongoing
discussions with people who are for and against the Cuban
revolution.
One person exclaimed, "Socialist Cuba, you must be crazy!" One rail worker, who is also a member of the French Communist Party (CP), said Cuba had made a "mistake by helping Angola," referring to the participation of hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers in the fight against repeated invasions of that country from 1975 to 1988 by the racist army of apartheid South Africa. "They should have kept the resources they had to take care of their own people," the CP member said.
Many workers originally from Africa, however, and many young people of all nationalities interviewed by Militant reporters, expressed a different view. Several said the Cuban revolution showed its real internationalism in Angola, and won the respect of many working people for that reason.
"It's very important what you're doing for Cuba because a lot of people here attack it," said a man walking by the socialists' literature table.
Elisabeth, a student from Jussieu University, said she was attracted to the Cuban revolution despite the campaign of the big-business media here to portray the government in Havana as a dictatorship. She emphasized she could "never find anybody who could explain the real situation and why Cuba was different" from the Soviet Union, until she met this group of communists.
Nouvelle Internationale no. 3 has also attracted a lot of attention here. This issue of the Marxist magazine features speeches by Thomas Sankara and Fidel Castro and the article "The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop" by Steve Clark.
A woman came by one literature table and bought a copy of Nouvelle Internationale no. 3. She explained that she really respected Sankara. She said she was one of the organizers of a mass demonstration and rally in Burkina Faso on March 8, 1987, in support of the revolution. That's when Sankara, the former president of that West African country, gave his well-known speech in favor of women's rights. (This talk is available in the Pathfinder pamphlet Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle.) Sankara was assassinated later that year by a group of counterrevolutionaries in the army, some of whom were Stalinists.
Team members visited rail workers in Paris who remained on strike the first week of January. They were demanding the withdrawal of financial penalties imposed on the workers for their walkout in December. The administration of the state-owned rail company (SNCF) backed down on January 5.
"It's their fault if we had to strike; we shouldn't pay for their mistakes," said Jean-Pierre Seguinel, talking about SNCF management.
The strikers were furious about the actions of the CRS riot police against the workers in Marseille, forcing them out of the bus depots they occupied (see accompanying article). José López, one of the rail strikers, noted that the government had used a terrorist bombing in a metro last fall "as an excuse to put more cops in the streets."
"There is no future for young people," López stated. "They get less pay" for the same work. The company has sharply reduced the number of rail workers by not hiring new employees as older rail workers retire.
Several strikers pointed out that life expectancy for rail workers in France is 57 years old. That's one of the reasons they fought tooth and nail against raising the rail retirement age from 50 to 55 - and they won.
Rollande Girard is a laid-off garment worker in Miami, Florida.