Review: The belated rise of French 'socialism' (The long march of the French left)

OF FRENCH

'SOCIALISM'

R W Johnson, The long march of the French left, Macmillan, 1981, pp345, pbk £8.95.

When Francois Mitterand won the Presidency of France in May sales of this book soared. It wasn't hard to see why: Mitterand's victory came as rather a surprise to Britain, and people hoped to find in Johnson's lengthy tome an explanation for it. They were to be disappointed. Though the author's research was clearly comprehensive and his writing for the most part a pleasure, his conclusion was that the French left had little hope of beating Giscard.

Johnson got it wrong because his book is only partially scientific. What he argues is as follows: Today's PCF is a child of the Resistance and owes much of its immediate post-war electoral success to the rural support it built up through the Maquis. However, the advent of De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic (1958) brought it difficulty. While it was committed to what Johnson loosely calls 'class politics', De Gaulle gained almost unanimous support for a national supra-class approach. The General's establishment of the Presidency also prevented the PCF from playing the blocking role it had enjoyed in the crisisridden parliaments of the Fourth Republic. Lastly, the industrialisation of France that De Gaulle pushed through ensured that the PCF's base in the countryside declined as people moved off the land, into white-collar jobs. and into the Socialist camp. May 1968, Johnson continues, was thus an end, not a beginning; an exception, not a rule, Through it the workers got syndicalist methods of struggle out of their system and made a determined bid to escape from the political ghetto and be recognised as a legitimate force in modern French society Mitterand benefited from this process, Marchais was hurt by it. Previously a declining party composed of rural schoolteachers and little else, the SFIO was transformed into the PS, gained itself mass support and even began to emulate the PCF by setting up workplace cells (sections d'enterprise). By contrast, the PCF was ghettoised - left playing a 'tribune' role ('standing up' for the working class rather than actually attempting to get into government) on terrain which made such a posture appear pointless and outdated.

Johnson completes his thesis with a look at the PCF's 'defensive mobilisation' in the 'seventies. Because the PS was more in tune with the times, he says, the PCF was bound to come off second best in the Union de Gauche. It met a dilemma: it could either throw off its orthodox- Stalinist, pro-Soviet heritage and so run the risk of becoming indistinguishable from the PS, or it could hang on to its traditions, meet with greater unpopularity.

Either way, both 'soft' and 'hard' wings of the PCF agreed central problem facing it was maintaining an independent existence. Despite their differences, Johnson suggests, Giscard and Chirac were always prepared to unite against the left.

But the PCF was not always prepared to unite with the PS - too much unity' could wreck it. In other words, it was the equivocations the PCF had over Mitterand that determined whether or not Giscard would ever go: 'the crisis of French Communism thus became the central fact of political life' (p280). PCF attempts to overcome that crisis by furious membership and factory cell drives failed.

among steelworkers and farmers against Germany and the EEC also brought little by way So, Johnson contends, the more the PCF declined, the more hostile it had to be towards the PS. And the more hostile it was, the less chance there was of left unity - the only formula that could beat Giscard. The long march of the left promised to be a march without end.

Much of what Johnson says is obviously correct.

events have shown his forecast to be erroneous. What is missing from his analysis?

France, as Johnson himself notes, industrialised late.

This meant that for a long time its working class was small, its trade unions weak and its labour bureaucracy virtually nonexistent. Thus while, at the turn of the century, classical social democracy took root in Britain and Germany, social democracy in France was feeble and had little base in the working class. What did have a base was syndicalism, a petit-bourgeois, anti-political tendency founded on the atomised, artisanal nature of French industry. It was syndicalism which gave the revolutionary majority of the SFIO a proletarian constituency when, in 1920, it went over to the Communist International and formed the PCF. The PCF soon evolved as an amalgam of syndicalism and Stalinism. The working class identified with it, not the SFIO which, as Trotsky rightly described it, was 'the party of the new middle estate' in the 'thirties. However the days of the PCF were numbered. If France industrialised properly, the material basis for syndicalism the degenerate character of the Soviet would vanish; if ever became apparent to the masses, PCF's hero-worship of Stalin would be a liability; and if the working class grew a trade union bureaucracy might emerge, one strong enough to provide the SFIO with solid As it happened each of these three developments took a long time to mature. The Nazis' wartime rape of growth of industry, France retarded the nationalisations of 1944-7 did little to increase industry's weight in the economy? The working class remained isolated and looked on the USSR as its only friend for more than 20 years. The union leaders, having forced the bosses to concede the principle of free collective bargaining in the Matignon agreements of 1936, found it rescinded in the downturn that followed the collapse of the Popular Front - and rescinded it stayed for decades, effectively denying them a role as mediators between employer and employed. No wonder the PCF's vote stayed constant year after year. After a time, however, the chickens began to come home to roost. Having got France out of Algeria and into the EEC, De Gaulle attacked the working class so ruthlessly 3 The Grenelle that industry expanded at a prodigious rate.

agreements that followed May 1968 allowed the bourgeoisie both to step up capital accumulation and to begin the process of house-training a labour bureaucracy.

With these two pressures and Mitterand's visceral anti- Sovietism too, the PCF was bound to decay.

Johnson's treatment of the economic background to the PCF's current decline is weak. A more thorough survey would have shown that the relatively high growth rates France exhibited in the 'seventies were sufficient to seal the fate of the PCF, but not sufficient to prevent the French bourgeoisie's longstanding crisis of leadership from coming to a head. Thus it was only logical that the PCF fall in with Mitterand on the second ballot in May, just as it was only logical that Chirac oppose the corrupt Giscard regime. For these reasons the long march of the left could come to an end after all.

Johnson's biggest mistake, however, is neither his superficial political economy nor the false election predictions that follow from this. He deals with the question of the trade union bureaucracy inadequately. He observes that, following the defeat of the left in the elections of 1978, CFDT leader Edmond Maire Minister Raymond Barre for discussions on a minimum wage and on industrial conciliation boards; that the CGT began to distance itself from the PCF at about the same time, and that both unions have been losing members hand over fist. But he draws no implications from this.

Though the implications are clearer now, they were already evident when the book was written.

can only survive by tying themselves more and more firmly his is what, more or less, they have agreed to do unde Mitterand - which is why the bourgeoisie is not to James Wood A Milward, The new order and the French economy, OUP, 1 W C Baum, The French economy and the state, Princeton, 2 1958. French industry grew at an average of 6 per cent a year, 3 1960-70 - twice as fast as Britain, and faster even than West Germany. It is a pity that Johnson, whose exposés of the PCF are generally witty and to the point, should congratulate it for 'creditable consistency' on the Algerian question (p52).

The PCF's shameless denial of self-determination for Algeria only fuelled reaction in France: it was not 'consistent' at all.

4 Johnson calls the union/Patronat wage deal struck in the Grenelle agreements 'extremely handsome' (p60). In fact it was one of the factors which helped French industry sustain a growth rate of more than 3 per cent for most of the 'seventies — higher than West Germany's again. Johnson is all too fond of representing defeats as victories. Thus we find that the record of tripartisme [1944-7] remains impressive' (p24) and that 'Stalin made the best deal he could get at Yalta' (p25).

It is phrases like these that make his use of the term 'Trotskyites' even more suspect than it would normally be.

32

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M Itoh, Value and crisis, Pluto Press, London, 1980, pp192, pbk £2.95. E H Carr, The wenty years' crisis: 1919-1939, Macmillan (Papermac), London, 1981, pp244, pbk £3.95.

Ngugi, Detained, Heinemann, London, 1981, pp232, pbk £2.95. Ngugi, Writers in politics, Heinemann, London, 1981, ppl42, pbk £2.95. erman and Gould. Collective bargaining and labo relations, Prentice/Hall International. London. 198 hbk £13.95. K Coates, Work-ins, sit-ins and industrial democracy, Spokesman, 1981, pp176, pbk £2.95.

C Griffiths, Afghanistan: key to a continent, Andre Deutsch London 1981. P Radcliffe, Racism and reaction: a profile of Handsworth, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp388, hbk £12,50.

P Rose, Backbencher's dilemma, Frederick Muller, London, 1981, hbk £8.95. • Fighting for Marxist politics inside the working class!

• Building a proletarian alternative to the Labour Party!

• Organising solidarity action with the liberation struggle in Ireland!

• Fighting racism on the streets and in the labour movement!

B Warren, Imperialism: pioneer of capitalism, Verso (NLB), London, 1980, pp274, pbk £3.95.

B Lomax, Eyewitness in Hungary: the Soviet invasion of 1956, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1980, pp184, hbk £8.50.

P Flanagan, Big Brother or democracy?, University of Adelaide, (distributed by Spokesman), Adelaide, 1980, ppl62, pbk £2.95. P Lowe, Britain in the Far East: a survey from 1819 to the present, Longman, USA, 1981, pp264, pbk £5.95.

A McAuley, Women's work and wages in the Soviet Union, G Allen & Unwin, London, 1981, pp228. hbk £18.00 S Aaronovitch et al, The Political Economy of Britis!

capitalism: a Marxist analysis, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead, 1981, pp398, pbk £7.95 S Bialer, Stalin's successors: leadership, stability and change in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, 1980, pp312, hbk £12.50.

P Norton and A Aughey, Conservatives and conservatism, Maurice Temple Smith Ltd, London, 1981, pp334, pbk £5.95.

Revolutionary Communist Papers No 2 Special issue on Ireland: British imperialism in Ireland and anti-imperialism No 3 The recession: capitalist offensive and the working class - a Marxist analysi No 4 Revisionism, imperialism and the state. A critique of the revisionist dogma of No S Thegle for powerin Aricibia today, Natal tomorrow? The forces behind the

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