"Today's topic, “Two years since the mass strikes in France, conclusions and prospects for the European workers' movement”, is a particularly important one for the French working class, not only because of the intensity of the struggle in 2023, but also because of its length, the mass movements of two years ago being the peak of a long-term battle.
We therefore like to begin by situating the battle around the 2023 counter-reform within the long timeframe of struggles around the pension system, and the interest of this one for our monopolies.
Secondly, we will set out in greater detail our positions and analyses of the union strategies put in place, their gains as well as their limits. Finally, we'll integrate the question of pensions into a crucial political issue for communists, particularly in the Revolutionary Communist Party of France today in a period of building and strengthening our Party: anarcho-syndicalism and its flip side, trade-union bureaucracies.
As we said at the outset, the battle over pension reform has a long history. It was as early as 2014 that president François Hollande's government tried to tackle it, without success. In 2017, the Macron government set itself the goal of dismantling the pension system. The reason for this is the strategic importance of pensions for the French bourgeoisie: they are an enormous source of capital for the bourgeoisie, and form part of the social gains won by armed anti-fascist resistance that the monopolies are trying to attack, alongside education and health. In 2019, mobilizations began.
The COVID-19 pandemic cut short the large-scale mobilizations provoked by this reform, with the government temporarily withdrawing this social offensive in order to gain social peace during the disastrous management of the pandemic, and it was not until 2023 that the struggle resumed. With a plan to postpone retirement from 62 to 64 with 43 years of contributions, the Macron government took another step forward. Where the 2019 points-based retirement scheme had tried in vain to confuse matters, the brutal announcement of a lower retirement age fully revealed the objective of the bourgeoisie. In 2023, the correlation of power shifted in favor of a possible victory for the labor and trade union movement. Firstly, the government's unpopularity peaked in poll after poll, showing a growing rejection of the reform (72% opposed on January 26, 2023, up 6 points in one week). The unpopularity of the government, police violence and the duration of the attacks since 2019 had momentarily created a more favorableposition for the working class.
The mobilizations of January 19 and 31, 2023 were on a massive scale (2.5 million demonstrators across the country), as were all the struggles that took place between these two dates in strategic sectors of the French monopolies: petrochemicals, electricity and gas, key sectors of French production capable of shaking the government. Since January 2023, our Party has been defending, both in our unions and publicly, the need to defend multiple forms of struggle that can last over time and win a superior correlation of power: organizing the blocking of profits through rotating regional general strikes that can last over time. Indeed, the interconnection and inter-regionalization of production means that blocking one geographical sector can hinder the whole of production. But this requires a work plan.
The other advantage is to reduce the financial burden of the strike for workers, since their own region is involved in the strike, depending on the preparation of the timetable and the planning of the struggle. Our party has also defended the call for national rallies centralized in Paris. This type of rally would enable us to extend the struggle against the decision-making centers of the state, by occupying the streets and encircling or invading the places where bourgeois democracy is represented (the National Assembly, for example). Finally, our Party has defended the general strike as a form of workers' democracy, or forms of struggle capable of attracting popular support for the movement, such as the “robin hood” employed by EDF who, from Lille to Marseille, triggered free electricity or restored power to users who had been deprived of it.
However, the interunion direction and the bureaucracies of all the unions had no strategy for confrontation, nor any plan for working and coordinating strikes or occupations. When they didn't prevent or slow them down, they did nothing to organize convergences, solidarity and communication between workers in struggle in their companies. The strategy of the union leaders was to make the public authorities listen to reason through “social democracy”, or to rely on parliamentarianism!
After months of intense mobilization and long strikes and occupations, but without coordination or strategy, the popular movement weakened after the use of Article 49-3, accompanied by anti-strike measures and renewed police violence against demonstrators. On April 14, 2023, Prime Minister Borne used this anti-democratic article, a textbook case of the dictatorship of capital, to constitutionally override all forms of parliamentarianism. Spontaneous rallies, following on from the still numerous ones held in early April, showed that popular anger was alive and kicking, in the face of this accumulation of attacks on our social and democratic rights. Some strike movements, such as those of the Paris garbage collectors, restarted with vigour.
Up until then, the protest movement had been largely confined to calls for demonstrations by the interunion, but from March onwards, it began to go beyond the framework of empty union marches to give rise to different forms of organization and action: spontaneous rallies multiplied, the yellow vests came back into the fight, the most radical union sections continued to call for strikes and proceeded with cutbacks (electricity, fuel, garbage collectors, etc. ...), blockades of businesses, universities, roads, which were increasingly numerous; rallies were marked by the convergence of watchwords and actions, uniting workers in struggle, students and high school students and pensioners. However, the mobilization was unable to sustain itself over the long term, and by June 2023, mass strikes and organized or spontaneous demonstrations had come to an end.
We need to look back at the tactics and strategies put in place by the union leaderships during this battle, in order to grasp its stakes and limits. Instead of rotating strikes at regional or federation level in key sectors, strikes were carried out, to use a pejorative expression from the rank and file, on a “leapfrog” basis, at the rate of one day a week, accompanied by demonstrations. Such a form of struggle was not only impossible to sustain over time, it also failed to build a correlation of power capable of truly blocking monopoly profits on a national scale. While the strikes were tactically uncoordinated and unplanned, the strategy of social dialogue instead of class confrontation impacted the popular movement from the outset. In fact, by organizing meetings between union leaders and the government, such a strategy could only amplify the disconnection of national leaderships from their rank and file through a lack of debate on forms of struggle and slogans, linked what's more to the practical issue of an inability to coordinate federal and regional tactical autonomy with a national strategy.
These difficulties, which our Party documented and confronted through our newspaper “intervention communiste” and the action of our comrades, were reflected with acuity at the 53rd CGT congress in March 2023, at the heart of the struggle for pensions. We wrote a whole article on this subject in our journal the number 176 of our newspaper.
From this brief assessment, our Party makes the link between the failure of this struggle and certain historical roots specific to France, especially in a period such as ours when we are building a Leninist Party today. It is through these roots that we believe we can provide perspectives and conclusions for the workers' movement, in that they inform us of certain tendencies to be combated at a time when Leninism is being defended.
Marx and Engels taught us in the 19th century that “France is the classic country of class struggle”, an example of spontaneity. The working class tended, firstly because of its numerical weakness, but also because of its democratic illusions stemming from the radical nature of the 1789 revolution, to subordinate its action to the republican bourgeoisie against the reactionary, monarchist wing of the capitalist class.
Another peculiarity was that Marxism was introduced later than in neighboring countries. The most influential working-class currents remained under the sway of the petty-bourgeoisie and its famous representative Proudhon. As a result, parliamentary, chauvinist and legalist deviations were reactivated at different times in the labor, socialist, and then communist movements. The political root of these multiple deviations lies in the non-assimilation or rejection of the materialist theory of the State fostered by Jacobinism and Jauressism.
Other objective factors, such as class structure in France and French imperialism, contributed to the dominance of reformism in the labor movement. Faced with these various opportunist currents, Jules Guesde, defender of Marxism in France, was unable to fully assimilate the Marxist theory of the state and link the social battles of demands to the general, strategic battle against capitalism.
At the end of the 19th century, the trade union movement developed rapidly. The CGT, founded in 1895, denounced, not without reason, the “parasitic role of elected representatives”, which led to a mistrust of political parties, including the socialists of the time. One result was the 1906 Amiens Charter. The CGT union thus took on a “political mission”, awkwardly claiming to be the embryo of the “socialist society emerging within trade unionism”, a combination of an anti-Party stance and anarcho-syndicalism.
We must not underestimate the damages and think that all we need to do is draw up a list of union demands to get things moving again. We need to think in depth about the forms of struggle needed for the strike movement to prevail. We need to be fully aware that union bureaucracies are not simply “soft”, but that they are a relay for politics and monopoly interests. Hence the decisive importance of working at base level, among workers in their own union and union section.
The necessary class and mass union recomposition will take place when the union bureaucracy, from the local union or company union to the confederal leadership for the CGT, appears treacherous in the eyes of the masses. We need to work tirelessly on this, and it's in the struggles that betrayals are revealed, not by proclaiming revolutionary principles that are often misinterpreted in the unions.
In recent years, all the reformist trade union organizations have literally become part of the state apparatus. The labor aristocracy is a veritable social stratum under imperialism. Combined with loyalty to the union apparatus, the dominant political reformism, anti “class unionism” since the 90s, but already powerful in the 80s (including in the CGT, which has been dragged down since the end of the 50s with the revisionism and social-democratization of the PCF), this reformism has done deep ideological damage to the now medium-sized or small cadres of trade unionism (“Union Départementale”, “Union Locale”, base unions).
This is the reality of French trade unionism, a reality which has contributed to depriving the workers' movement of social victories, even if it is true that this was within a period of counter-revolution.Certain struggles did succeed in preventing Villepin and Sarkozy's CPE (contrat première embauche) in 2006, but at the cost of an outburst from the union leadership (including the CGT confederal leadership) that has not yet occurred in the fight for pensions.
During the PCF's Eurocommunist turn, this class betrayal had catastrophic repercussions for the trade union movement, as it led to political encouragement for reformist currents and the capitulation of leaders. From 1981 onwards, with the election of Mitterrand and the participation of the PCF in the government, the CGT union federations pushed for the moderation of demands, abandoning the combative sectors that were in struggle. The CGT left the WFTU and joined the ETUC, before joining the International Trade Union Confederation. Over the decades, an interdependence has thus developed between the opportunist, Eurocommunist leadership of the PCF and the reformist, bureaucratic trade union leadership, with one continually nurturing the other. Of course, this dynamic has its objective underpinnings, first and foremost among which are the labor aristocrats in their various forms of social existence, forming the objective basis for the penetration of reformist and bourgeois views within the labor movement. In addition to these aristocrats, there have been significant changes in the composition of the French working class. These include the decline of traditional sectors (metallurgy, iron and steel, textiles, etc.). ), but also the digitization of the economy, the outsourcing of part of production by the monopoly bourgeoisie to small and medium-sized enterprises closely controlled by it; the relocation and internationalization of production; the double movement of the relative rise in the qualification of the workforce, having momentarily strengthened the labor aristocracy all the more, as did the perpetuation of unemployment and anti-union repression. As far as today's France is concerned, and as a result of this historical dynamic, the trade union movement is largely dominated by all varieties of reformism and opportunism, with the recent CGT leadership under Sophie Binet, for example, calling for a unilateral vote for the pseudo “New Popular Front”.
What was at stake for our Party during the struggle for pensions was the exacerbation of the result of the previously described evolution: combative bases on class and mass positions in forms of struggle as well as organizations, but tending towards anarcho-syndicalism due to the lack of a communist party, in response to omnipresent union bureaucracies that could not rise tothe challenges of this battle.
During the pension battle as today, in the construction of our Party, we argue that the intervention of communists, as union militants and as party members, is more necessary than ever, so that through facts and experience we can simultaneously combat reformist directions and overcome the anarcho-syndicalism that we observe in the union movement. It is still important to remember that these trends within the base of the CGT and its most combative sectors are fundamentally healthy in their rejection of the policies pursued by the leadership, but which can only lead to a trade-unionist conception of the struggle ultimately just as reformist as those they claim to combat. It is characteristic that one of the most well-known opponents of the CGT leadership claims to be an anarcho-syndicalist and publicly supported candidates from the WAP in the last European elections.
In this battle, our party has decided that its members should participate in all initiatives aimed at reconstructing class struggle unionism, without sectarianism, through experience and in-depth debate on the results of the struggles. In the same movement, strengthening a class and mass union forms and strengthens a Leninist Party and its cadres through experience, without denying the differences between the tasks of the union and the Party, so that the deadlock of anarcho-syndicalist "red unions" can be overcome through class struggle. Without the intervention of revolutionary communists, the union struggle does not lead to the understanding of the necessity of overthrowing capitalism and the necessity of communism. Our strategic objective in France is the construction of a strong Party recognized by the masses, while this objective is muddled by a false Communist Party (the PCF) and equally opportunistic satellite organizations. If the existence of a class center is not mechanically linked to the existence of a revolutionary-type Communist Party, the concomitance or correlation between the two seems close.
Dear comrades, like the Leninist Communist Party, class-based trade unionism has its material roots, created by the exploitation of wage labor. No administrative or authoritarian measure from a confederate or central leadership, as we often see, will be able to change this fact. The crisis of capitalism in its imperialist stage, the intensified contemporary contradictions, create every day, from all the injustices, closures, relocations, the conditions for the rebirth of classstruggle trade unionism and a revolutionary Communist Party."
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