For revolutionary socialist opposition to Sarkozy ’ s austerity

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For revolutionary socialist opposition to Sarkozy’s austerity
By Alex Lantier and Kumaran Ira
23 June 2010

Workers marching in France against pension cuts on June 24 are at a crossroads.
Broad masses of workers are concluding that old forms of opposition—”days of
action” called by the trade unions—will not halt the austerity policies of the
ruling class.

Instead, after receiving hundreds of billions in public bailout money, the banks
are using panics on government debt markets to relentlessly press for more
anti-working-class measures. As the latest wave of cuts spreads from Greece to
Portugal and Spain, and from Britain to France, it is obvious: the banks are
prepared to attack workers of any and all countries, in a race to the bottom in
living standards.

The rape of Greece is a warning of what the financial aristocracy is preparing
internationally. Social-democratic Prime Minister George Papandreou is slashing
wages and social spending by 20, 30, and 50 percent. Workers are to be set back
generations amid a wave of ineffectual strikes, led by unions controlled by
Papandreou’s own PASOK party.

Society faces a historic failure of capitalism. Arguments last month between
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel over how to
pay for the bailouts grew so heated that Sarkozy reportedly threatened to quit
the euro. In response, European Central Bank Director Jean-Claude Trichet said
that the world situation was the “most difficult” since 1939-1945, and perhaps
since 1914-1918.

Trichet’s remarkable reference to the two world wars is a stark warning of the
intensity of the crisis. Workers face a situation unprecedented in France since
the Great Depression, and the May-June 1936 general strike that broke out after
the election of the Popular Front government.

Sentiment for a general strike is rising, as workers correctly conclude that the
unions’ one-day strikes bring them nothing. A recent poll found that 58 percent
of the French population does not believe one-day union protests will stop the
pension cuts. Asked to choose the most effective way to defend social rights, 67
percent chose a general strike.

The outbreak of mass strikes will be welcomed by every class-conscious worker:
only resolute action will halt the onslaught of the financial aristocracy.
However, a united strike of the entire working class will only make clear the
more fundamental political problems facing working people.

A general strike inevitably poses the question of state power: who determines
what happens after workers return to work?

Writing in 1920 against social-democratic opponents of the Russian Revolution,
Leon Trotsky noted that the general strike “in itself cannot produce the
solution of the problem, because it exhausts the forces of the proletariat
sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or later, forces the workers
to return to the factories. The general strike acquires a decisive importance
only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the armed forces
of the opposition” (Terrorism and Communism).

Trotsky’s comments were fully confirmed by events. Surprised by the 1936 general
strike, Parti communiste français (PCF) leader Maurice Thorez famously demanded:
“One must know how to end a strike as soon as its demands have been met.” As
part of its pact to preserve French capitalism as a Kremlin ally against
Germany, the PCF told workers not to strike except on trade unions’ call, and
quietly coordinated its actions with the government. The Popular Front
government itself was soon mobilising troops against striking workplaces.

Four years later, the PCF and the rest of the Comintern were allied with Hitler
under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and pro-Nazi sentiment in the ruling class was
hastening France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany.

These historical questions, seen from the side of the ruling class, preoccupy
leading trade unionists and the bourgeois “left” today. Detailing his meeting
with European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, European Trade Union
Confederation chief John Monks warned that “this is 1931” and that Europe “ended
up with militarist dictatorship” in the 1930s.

Monks explained: “I had a discussion with Barroso last Friday about what can be
done for Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest, and his message was blunt: ‘Look,
if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could
virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies.’ ... He shocked
us with an apocalyptic vision of democracies in Europe collapsing because of the
state of indebtedness.”

He concluded, “Greece obviously does have to change. It does have to tighten
up.… They haven’t got a choice, Greece. They’ve got to comply with what they’ve
been given.” In short, social opposition must be manipulated and stifled, so the
ruling class can carry out peacefully measures it would otherwise need
dictatorship to enforce. This is the cowardly perspective of operatives totally
loyal to the financial aristocracy.

Such perspectives dominate the trade unions and “left” establishment. CGT union
leader Bernard Thibault is suddenly reconsidering his public support for
Sarkozy’s cuts. After spending the last four months arranging the details of
pension cuts with Sarkozy, Thibault reassured RTL radio: “A government does not
necessarily fall because one of its projects does not go through.” Even if this
cut is temporarily delayed, Thibault implies, Sarkozy can stay—to pass the cuts
once the political climate has shifted.

The Parti socialiste (PS), the French bourgeoisie’s left party of rule, has also
done an about-face, claiming it would bring retirement age back to 60 if elected
to the presidency in 2012. This is a grotesque lie from a pro-austerity party.
The 1997-2002 Plural Left (PS-PCF-Greens) government ignored calls by sections
of the PS during the election campaign to reverse conservative Prime Minister
Edouard Balladur’s 1993 pension cuts. This January, PS First Secretary Martine
Aubry called for pension cuts and increasing the retirement age by two years.

The bourgeois “left” and the unions in fact play leading roles in planning the
cuts. The state Pensions Advisory Council (Conseil d’orientation des retraites,
COR) panel includes PS deputy Pascal Terrasse and senator René Teulade, the
PCF’s Maxime Gremetz and members of all the main unions, including the CGT’s
Jean-Christophe Le Duigou and the CFDT’s Jean-Louis Malys. The COR helped plan
the 2003 and 2007 pension cuts; its April report called for more cutbacks to
deal with public deficits.

The most preposterous proposal came from the middle-class Nouveau parti
anticapitaliste. Asked if he supported a general strike, NPA spokesman Olivier
Besancenot said: “It’s the only solution, faced with an oligarchy imposing an
incredible relationship of forces. [Last year’s strike in] Guadeloupe gives the
example to follow, a united and radical movement.”

Such claims testify to the NPA’s political unseriousness. Aiming to obtain
limited subsidies from the state, the small businessmen and local officials
leading the Guadeloupe strike signed a rotten deal with Sarkozy to stifle and
end the strike. Such political strangulation of workers’ opposition has led to
the current crisis—yet Besancenot holds it up as a “radical” example to follow!

The revolutionary tasks of the coming movement of the European working class
make such a settlement impossible. Subordinating the financial markets to the
needs of the working class means nationalising banks and major industries, under
the democratic control of the working class—that is, the establishment of
socialism. A confrontation with the ruling class is inevitable.

The outbreak of mass protests and strikes is on the agenda. It can proceed only
through the creation of workers’ committees, independent of the trade unions.
The experience of the 1995 general assemblies—created to coordinate strikes and
protests during France’s rail strikes—is critical, however, to understanding the
challenges this will pose to workers.

Politically dominated by the unions and middle-class parties, lacking a
perspective of opposition to the government, those assemblies dissolved and
workers were forced back to work, defeated. When workers are armed with a
political perspective, however, such organisations can become centers of
political power to rival and then replace the banks and the capitalist state—as
did the Soviets of revolutionary Russia in 1917.

The International Committee of the Fourth International—the orthodox Trotskyist
movement—calls on workers to join the struggle for socialism. It has the
established the World Socialist Web Site as an international organ to report on
and provide perspectives for the struggles of the working class. It invites
socialist-minded workers and intellectuals to read and contact the WSWS, and
fight to build the ICFI as the revolutionary party of the international proletariat.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/fran-j23.shtml

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