French Rulers Put Squeeze on Workers’ Fight-Back

PARIS, June 1 — Due to sharpening imperialist competition, French President Sarkozy is now ignoring most of France’s union “leaders” leaving them virtually paralyzed. While these misleaders plead with the government to negotiate, and organize symbolic 24-hour protest strikes, Sarkozy steamrolls right past them with plans to dismantle both the welfare state and the unions.

To pursue its imperialist agenda, the French government needs a docile workforce and ready cash. For example, while visiting Iraqi officials today, foreign minister Kouchner offered them French military instructors to train the Iraqi army. In return, the Iraqi prime minister offered to buy state-of-the-art military technology from France, one of the world’s leading exporters of arms and aircraft.

Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said “there is an urgent need for French companies to be more present here in Iraq.” Sarkozy wants European Union imperialism to penetrate Iraq in the next six months. Therefore, the government is playing hardball with the unions here.

On May 22, thousands struck and over 450,000 demonstrated in 153 cities protesting government “reforms” to force workers to work longer for smaller retirement pensions. But Sarkozy intends to push his reform through, consulting the unions only on precise points and without trying to get approval from even the most sellout unions (Le Figaro, 5/23).

The main teachers’ unions called for another 24-hour strike on May 24 against government plans to axe 11,200 jobs next school year, but while 15,000 demonstrated in Nantes, the action was only partly successful elsewhere. The following day Education Minister Darcos announced the cuts would be maintained and “protest marches won’t change a thing.”

That hard-line position was enough to bust up the union coalition. On May 27, three teachers unions said they were “suspending” the protest movement.

The government then busted up union unity around another 24-hour strike against retirement “reform” planned for June 17. When the smaller unions split with the bigger ones (CGT and CFDL) over the latter’s back-door agreement with the bosses’ organization MEDEF, the government then double-crossed the whole business with a measure undermining the 35-hour work-week.

With the union misleaders at loggerheads, Sarkozy is attacking on yet another front — introducing a bill to make it easier to shift public workers from one ministry to another, and even to shift them out of the public sector altogether.

The government has been able to play off these union misleaders against each other because they’re all competing to become the government’s “preferred negotiating partner.” The big losers are the workers.
Only communist leadership, dedicated not to negotiating with the government to “improve” capitalism, but to overthrowing the government and the capitalist system, offers a way forward for the working class here.J

French Government Boxes in Undocumented Immigrants

PARIS, June 1 — A January 7 government circular which legalizes undocumented workers in dribs and drabs is keeping them at the mercy of the bosses and their government. The circular provides for the legalization of workers who can produce a job contract, proof they’ve been working for three months and a promise from their boss to pay the costs of legalization. But each prefecture is allowed to apply the law as it sees fit.
The result is a feudal system in which legalization depends on a worker’s relationship with his boss, and the boss’s relationship with the prefect. Another aim is to smash the strike movement for legalization launched by undocumented workers in April.

FRANCE: Teachers’ Strike in 130 Cities Against Gov’t Cuts

PARIS, May 16 — Yesterday, according to the government’s understated figures, 860,000 public workers struck against job cuts and government policies dismantling public services, demonstrating in over 130 cities. It was particularly strong in education, with over half of junior and senior high school teachers and nearly two-thirds of primary school teachers on strike. Large contingents of high school students livened up the protests.

In Marseilles and five other cities, teachers’ general assemblies voted to renew their strike on May 19, in some cases over the opposition of the union leaders. They hope to spark a break with the ritual 24-hour protest strike.

Longer and more intense strikes are needed to force the government to back down from the 22,900 education job losses programmed in the 2008 budget. Indeed, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reaction to yesterday’s walkout was to propose new strike-breaking laws to “protect” the “right to work.”

The government’s onslaught on public workers — which includes last year’s elimination of special retirement plans for mainly rail workers performing particularly hard jobs — is not driven solely by budget-balancing needs, after giving the rich tax breaks of 222 million euros ($350 million) in 2007 (to increase this year). Privatizing public services is also part of the bosses’ strategy to cut wages and benefits for ALL workers.

France’s 5,000,000 public workers cannot be laid off or fired for union activity as easily as private-sector workers. They form the core of the French trade union movement. About 15% of public workers belong to unions, as against 5% of private-sector workers.

Given that French bosses are competing with rivals worldwide, they need to smash the French labor movement in order to maximize profits. For instance, while from 1996 to 2007, labor costs in Germany fell 5%, they rose 20% in France. (Charlie Hebdo, 5/7/2008) Nevertheless, with inflation, real wages in France have fallen 4.2% in the private sector and 7.0% in the public sector since 1994. (Council on Employment, Income and Social Cohesion)

Furthermore, French bosses are participating in on-going wars to re-divide the world. The French expeditionary force in Afghanistan now numbers 3,200 soldiers, and France is suspected of having tried to overthrow Sudan’s government (Le Canard Enchaîné, 5/14/08). The bosses need a docile workforce on the home front.

Successful extension of the teachers’ strike movement would build the May 22nd national strike called by all the major unions to protest government plans to increase the number of work-years needed for a full retirement pension. Previous pension “reform” laws have already led to a 30% relative fall in pensions as against wages. Air France and rail-worker unions have joined the strike call.

While it’s necessary to fight against job cuts and for decent pensions, as long as capitalism exists so will the bosses’ drive to increase exploitation and launch imperialist wars.      That’s why workers here and worldwide must go beyond struggles to “reform” capitalism and organize for communist revolution to destroy capitalism. J

BULLETIN  May 19 — About 40,000 teachers and their supporters demonstrated in Paris yesterday. An inter-trade union federation meeting today proposed no action except to renew the call, initially launched by the French PTA, for a demonstration on May 24. It also ignores the high school students’ protest movement. In short, most of the union “leaders” are doing everything they can to alienate the teachers’ potential allies and keep the movement “manageable.”
In such a situation, communists put forward organizing the widest possible support for striking teachers, forging the links necessary to help develop the revolutionary potential of the working class.

1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France

Forty years ago this May, a revolt by millions of French workers and students led to a general strike that paralyzed the country for three weeks, caused the government to collapse and electrified the entire world. This struggle’s anniversary is noteworthy because “May 68” still has much to teach us.

The upheaval began as a student protest, similar to those occurring on a daily basis during that period throughout Europe and the U.S., although  general working-class anger and a 67-day white-collar metal workers’ strike in Saint Nazaire in 1967 provided the tinder for the spark that was about to come. That strike affected all the metal workers and won broad solidarity from all the workers in the city, especially from women’s protest marches of 3,000 and 4,000.

On March 22 in 1968, about 150 students and others invaded an administration building at Nanterre University outside Paris to demand reforms in the university’s budget. The administration called the cops and the students left the building. Protests continued, so on May 2 the administration closed Nanterre.

Four days later, 20,000 students and professors marched to the Sorbonne, Paris’s main university. The police rioted, launching tear gas grenades and beating and arresting hundreds of protesters. On May 10, another mass demonstration led to a pitched battle, lasting well into the night. Again, the cops ran amok. Police provocateurs launched Molotov cocktails, providing a convenient excuse for more beatings and arrests.

By now, sympathy for the student protesters and revulsion at police brutality was spreading throughout the working class. The French “Communist” Party — having long become a pro-ruling class puppet — and other fake-left organizations attempted to co-opt the growing movement with a call for a one-day strike on May 13. More than a million people marched through Paris that day. The government made minor concessions, but the protests mounted.

Most significantly, they spread throughout the working class. On May 13, workers at the Sud Aviation plant in the western city of Nantes began a sit-down strike. A strike by Renault auto parts workers near the northern city of Rouen spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes in the Seine valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By May 16, workers had occupied 50 factories; by May 17, the number of strikers had swelled to 200,000. A day later, two million were on strike; the following week, 10,000,000 workers, roughly two-thirds of France’s work-force, had hit the bricks.

Significantly, these strikes were not led by the organized unions, which did everything in their power to contain and reverse the movement. Police terror having failed, the labor “leadership,” including the “Communist” Party, tried bribery, but the workers turned down a significant pay increase and remained on strike.

On May 30, nearly a half-million workers and students marched through Paris chanting “Adieu, De Gaulle” (Farewell De Gaulle), to express their hatred for France’s president and his government.
De Gaulle had already flown secretly to Germany to enlist the support of the infamous General Jacques Massu, known for his justification of torture during France’s colonial war in Algeria. De Gaulle had appointed Massu commander of French military forces in Germany, and Massu was preparing to send French regiments home to suppress the revolt.

However, the French ruling class didn’t need the army. The revolt quickly subsided because of its own internal flaws. Crucial among these was the absence of leadership from a revolutionary communist party with a mass base within the working class. Only such a party could have given strategic and tactical direction to the longing angrily expressed by French workers and students for fundamental change in society. Only such a party could have raised the question of smashing capitalist state power and replacing it with a working-class dictatorship. This is the key lesson for us today, but not the only one.

The revolt occurred at a time when the concept of the working class’s role in society and the revolutionary process had come under assault from a gaggle of fake-left “theorists,” led by a professor named Herbert Marcuse. The millions who struck France’s factories exposed the shallowness of this viewpoint and dramatically showed that the working class alone, which builds and runs everything, has the potential to revolutionize society and bring about meaningful change. This principle is just as valid today.

The events of May 68 also clearly demonstrated the key secondary role of students and intellectuals in the revolutionary process. It’s no accident that the struggle began on a college campus before spreading to the factories. Despite several abortive attempts, France’s student strikers failed to make a significant alliance with the millions of working-class strikers, but this failure in no way invalidates the strategic necessity for a worker-student alliance. More than anything, it highlights the absence of communist leadership.

A third key lesson is the absolute bankruptcy of reformism. The workers who rejected the salary bribe had an inkling of the right idea here; without a communist party to lead them, they were forced to fight blindfolded, with one hand tied behind their backs.

After the strike ended, De Gaulle quit the presidency, replaced by his henchman, Georges Pompidou. A host of reforms ensued. Forty years later, France remains a capitalist dictatorship. Unemployment for younger workers hovers between 20 and 25 percent and is much higher for immigrant workers. Racism, particularly against black workers from Africa and Arab workers is rampant in the land of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” France’s rulers continue to seek status as junior partners in the bloody scramble among U.S. bosses and others for control of Persian Gulf oil. French capitalism is thus helping grease the skids for the next world war.

Pro-boss cynics say May 68 justifies the lie that class struggle always leads to disappointment. PLP differs. The struggles of workers and students in France two generations ago belong to our class’s living history, if we absorb their lessons and interpret them correctly. In the past four decades, capitalism has solved none of the problems that led to this revolt. If anything, the problems have worsened. Therefore, more revolts are only a matter of time. In fact, now there is speculation about workers’ reaction to this 40th anniversary and whether current student demonstrations and school occupations could spark another strike wave.

PLP’s job remains the same everywhere: to spread our revolutionary ideas and build our revolutionary organization under any and all circumstances, so that when struggle of this magnitude once again erupts, its goal will be working-class dictatorship and its outcome will be a massive spurt in the ranks of communist-minded workers and students.

‘If communism was good, why was the USSR destroyed?’

SPAIN — In a meeting with friends, we took up very important topics including communism, and the capitalist crisis of overproduction, but especially the fight against revisionism (capitalist ideas disguised as communist ideas). A comrade mentioned that, “In Peru you hear communist ideas a lot in the communities (for example, in the city of Ayacucho).” She mentioned that “in years past the group Sendero Luminoso organized university students and farm workers against the exploiters.” She had been a member of the group.

But the following question arose, “Why, if communism is good, was the USSR destroyed? Is it because people can’t have higher political understanding?” I answered, “At this time, capitalism has many weapons to divide the working class and to push the lie that communism was a disaster, but that’s not true and we communists in the PLP know it. Socialism failed in the USSR, not communism.” I explained that when a group fights for reforms (like Sendero Luminoso, the FMLN, FSLN, and other revisionist groups in Latin America that fight for national liberation and socialism) they’ll never achieve communism because they keep capitalist ideas and practices. So she responded, “but then you want to tell me that in order for there to be communism, we need an armed revolution?” “Exactly,” I said.

In the study of dialectical materialism we know that the way to solve a contradiction is to intensify it. “So that water can become steam, the temperature has to rise high enough to a certain point, at which water is converted into something else –– steam,” I explained to my friends. “It’s the same with the struggle to destroy capitalism in order to build communism.”

I explained that we have to understand the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. I showed them that if we have one pencil, we can break it easily, but that if we put 20 pencils together, it’s much harder to break them. In the same way, we have to build the Party to unite the working class with communist ideas. She said I was right and that we needed to continue the discussion.

Another youth who is influenced by capitalist ideas continued to insist that communism is in the past and was simply a failure. I talked about the many good things that happened in the Soviet Union in education, health care, housing , etc. The workers lived better than they ever did under under capitalism! And they united to defeat Hitler’s fascism.

At the end, my Peruvian friend was very emotional because the discussion cleared up many questions and she wanted to keep talking. The other youth said he didn’t understand how any society could exist without money. I limited my remarks to the fact that a capitalist economy and a communist economy were completely different, opposites, and that to be able to understand this he first had to understand dialectical materialism and put it into practice. All of this was very useful, because we were able to show that we can fight for and build a communist system even though we’re contaminated with all these capitalist ideas.

Now I need more Party material to study and to distribute among friends in this part of the world. Now I see that there are many people interested in the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party and, in addition to the interesting articles in CHALLENGE, I need to give them material to use to study dialectical materialism. We must massively spread these ideas to establish a real communist system in which workers hold the reins of society.

Organizing CHALLENGE Clubs in Spain

An Irish youth described a police attack on a PLP meeting as reported in a previous CHALLENGE: “When we were leaving at 6:30 AM and opened the door, cops were there to spray pepper gas in our faces. They tried to force their way in and arrest us but we stopped them. One young woman was in a state of shock; the rest were vomiting due to the gas. When some youths who stayed and then prepared to leave later, they were surprised by the police who yelled at, insulted and ridiculed them for throwing up due to the pepper spray.”

Shortly afterwards I met with the collective and began preparing a leaflet describing the police treatment of youth and the working class worldwide. “This has made us stronger,” declared this Irish youth, emboldening him to confront capitalism’s whole fascist movement.

Now we’re working in some neighborhood social workshops enabling residents to take classes near their homes. The workshops include classes in French, English, Italian and martial arts as well as a project to form a musical band, all to benefit the community. These workshops offer the opportunity to spread the Party’s ideas to more people and put them on the long road to destroy capitalism and establish communist workers’ power.

Many of our friends read CHALLENGE and some share it on the internet. Others ask for copies to place at art displays for passers-by to read. The “Okupa” movement in this city is big. Many youth organize to occupy abandoned sites and create workshops in art, music and other activities the community needs. While these youth feel impelled to do something for society, they lack a political line that explains why we must fight this system. As a communist PLP’er, this motivates me to participate in these groups and advance our ideas on the destruction of capitalism.

The Party is organizing clubs to study CHALLENGE and recruit these youth to PLP. We’re bent on continuing to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide.

A PLP’er Immigrant in Spain

French Labor Hacks Put One-Day Limit on Million Strikers

PARIS, Jan. 25 — Amid capitalism’s world economic meltdown, some one million public sector workers struck for one day yesterday across France while many strikers were among the 400,000 who joined protest marches in Paris and other cities nationwide. Private sector workers from General Motors, Airbus and Bugatti were among the marchers. But yesterday’s strike was smaller than the one on November 20. While half the school teachers and 20% of the postal workers walked out, the strike was less successful elsewhere, in particular in rail transport.

Public workers’ demands included a 1,500-euro ($2,200) per month minimum wage, a 300-euro ($450) per month wage-hike for all public workers and higher retirement pensions and welfare and unemployment benefits.

Among healthcare workers, five emergency healthcare unions today called for emergency room workers to continue their month-old strike following the “total failure” of negotiations with the health ministry. Demands include shorter hours, higher pay for night work and compensation for the stress their jobs entail.

In November, nearly two million workers struck and 700,000 demonstrated, creating the real possibility of building a strike movement linking all public and private sector workers with workers of African and Arab origin. But the union misleaders frittered away the opportunity by limiting the strike to a single day. After two months of calm, it became more difficult to re-launch the movement.

Due to the weakness of yesterday’s strike, budget minister Eric Woerth was able to merely promise “announcing” a wage measure on Feb. 18, adding that the government would establish “a mechanism to guarantee individual purchasing power” — i.e., merit pay to pit workers against each other.

Still, there was more public support for yesterday’s walkout than for November’s. Polls showed 77% of public sector workers and 51% of private sector workers felt the strike was justified. The bosses’ massive attacks that will surely come to force workers to pay even more for the world’s economic crisis demand a break with all pro-capitalist forms of leadership.
Workers need communist leadership to unite all our struggles in a movement aiming to destroy capitalism, the source of all workers’ problems. For example, the struggle against the deportation of undocumented immigrants is one the labor movement needs to take on board.

In December, over 100 undocumented workers in three detention camps began a hunger strike to protest conditions in the camps and to demand their liberation. On January 19, the European Day Against the Confinement of Foreigners, 12,000 demonstrated nationwide, with 3,000 at the biggest protest, in Paris.

But as one trade unionist remarked after the Lyons demonstration, “The composition of the demonstration does reveal the fact that this movement’s mobilization is not anchored in trade unions’…practice.” That is, the major unions never advance the class analysis that undocumented and “legal” workers are members of the same working class. Consequently, these unions now have a hard time overcoming the bosses’ racist and nationalist propaganda, making it harder to mobilize in defense of immigrant workers’ rights.
Workers could take their cue from the young rebels who militantly fought the rulers’ cops in protesting the latter’s racist attacks on

Arab and African youth. Multi-racial unity of the unions and these rebels could strike a real blow against the ruling class’s attacks on both groups.

Growing PLP Club in Spain Links Study and Action

SPAIN — “I didn’t know that an international party existed that was so concerned about the workers of the entire world,” said a friend, a student from France, when I showed her CHALLENGE-DESAFIO at a meeting of a club formed in one of the largest cities here. Our club began with a Turkish worker and myself, an immigrant worker from El Salvador. Now we’re more than ten workers of different nationalities. We’ve joined marches organized by the transit unions and other mass reform groups fighting for better transit city-wide.

We met to review international events. It became complicated because two workers from Ireland didn’t understand much Spanish, but a youth from Venezuela translated our discussion on dialectical materialism. One was very excited because he hadn’t understood before why — if the communist line was correct — the old Soviet Union failed. Then he read a CHALLENGE explaining some of the errors committed then. We all concluded that in order to establish a system in which we’re all equal, instead of fighting for socialism as a stage between capitalism and communism, we must fight directly for communism.

Our French friend was quite taken with the recent workers’ and youth mass protests back home. Then when we read CHALLENGE, she saw the title headline saying when workers unite, we can stop the whole capitalist machinery. She took several copies to continue sharing communist ideas with her fellow students in France.

We met a week later in an area “occupied” by squatters to celebrate a member’s birthday, which led to turning a bad thing into a good thing. While discussing the racist police repression here against immigrants and social groups in general, the cops knocked at the door. Someone had called them to report a group of “disorderly” squatters in the neighborhood.

The good thing: we organized everything in a way that seemed natural. Two people left to talk to the cops. One stayed to guard the doors to bar their entrance, and another pair organized the rest to make a plan. The police said we couldn’t meet here, to go elsewhere. So one group left for the park and the others (immigrants without “proper” papers) stayed. Then we got the police to leave.

Afterwards, we all returned and initiated a sharper discussion. We said we need to print more leaflets and try to organize struggles with revolutionary, not reform goals.

These friends of the Party are now excited because they understand communist ideas more clearly, including the significance of union struggles for reforms and the real struggle that all workers must carry out worldwide, the fight for a communist system, organized by the only international communist party, PLP. We must fight to build more CHALLENGE readers’ clubs everywhere.

An internationalist communist worker

Unity With African, Arab Workers Critical to Union Fight vs. French Bosses, Hacks

PARIS, January 9 — Workers are searching for effective ways to fight the government’s continuing attacks on them. The next test of strength will be a public workers’ strike on January 24.

Yesterday President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted he wants to abolish the 35-hour work-week and impose racist immigration quotas. On January 6, Budget and Civil Service Minister Eric Woerth repeated his refusal to uniformly raise public workers’ wages, which fell 6% between 2000 and 2006 due to inflation. Wage negotiations for public workers will begin January 14.

On November 20, some two million public and private workers struck for higher wages. (See CHALLENGE, 11/28/07 and 12/12/07) When Woerth refused to consider an across-the-board wage hike on Dec. 19, six union federations representing public workers called for demonstrations and a strike on January 24. Five teachers’ unions joined the strike call, demanding higher wages and protesting the government’s decision to eliminate 11,200 jobs.

Education Minister Xavier Darcos then announced he will test strike-breaking “minimum service” in public schools in at least four cities that have signed strike-breaking contracts with the national government. Scabs will baby-sit pupils to keep them in school and not disrupt parents’ work schedules, minimizing the strike’s impact.

Scabs will be paid with money docked from the strikers’ wages. The unions denounced “minimum service” as an assault on the right to strike.

These attacks stem from the inter-imperialist rivalry that is pressing the bosses in each country to drive for maximum profits by taking them out of the pockets of the working class, smashing the social contract that has existed since World War II. Only international working-class unity can begin to meet these attacks.

Increasingly, workers here realize that they must meet escalating government attacks with greater working-class unity across public sector-private sector divisions. Responding to this rank-and-file pressure, the FO union confederation called for private-sector workers to join the January 24 demonstrations, but stopped short of calling on them to strike.

The SUD-Education union in northern Brittany issued a sarcastic statement denouncing “an isolated, one-day strike by only public workers,” asking why the major trade unions insist on: (1) pursuing the losing 24-hour-strike strategy, (2) negotiating crumbs while abandoning fundamental demands, and (3) allying with the government’s effort to smash the welfare state. SUD-Education 22 nevertheless backed the strike call.

Several recent developments underlined workers’ and students’ combative mood. The public television union is calling for a strike to oppose plans to merge the five public TV companies and lay off workers.
The CFE-CGC nurses’ union is calling for a strike to protest unpaid overtime hours. Each nurse is owed an average of 70 hours overtime pay from 2007.

Tolbiac University students here voted to strike and occupy university buildings to protest Sarkozy’s “reforms.” Classes were disrupted and cancelled, and access to elevators was blocked. The students condemned “the privatization of the universities, and the axing of some academic departments,” and also raised the anti-racist demand of “papers for all undocumented immigrants.”

This is an important step in making the fight against racism central to workers’ and students’ overall demands. The rank and file must link their struggle to that of African and Arab workers and youth against racist unemployment and police terror. Otherwise, the rulers will have accomplished their goal of dividing and weakening the entire working class.

Nevertheless, as of today, the CFDT union confederation — whose leader was denounced as a sellout and expelled by angry workers from the November 20 Paris march — still wanted to look at government proposals before considering joining the strike.

These pro-capitalist union misleaders will push workers to the bottom. Communist leadership is needed to turn workers’ and students’ growing frustration with the union hacks’ betrayals into an understanding that only communist revolution can abolish the whole capitalist system, with its bosses, reactionary governments and labor fakers.