The dissolution of the Ligue Communiste, the arrest of Alain Krivine and Pierre Rousset, and the searching and sacking of the offices at impasse Guéménée are not accidental incidents standing out in an otherwise normal situation. They are the deliberate actions of a bourgeois regime faced with a rise of the class struggle in France and, more generally, in the other countries of Western Europe.
No one has been fooled by the false symmetry invoked by the French government in simultaneously dissolving the Ligue Communiste and the pro-Nazi organization Ordre Nouveau. The French government permitted the racist meeting organized by Ordre Nouveau on June 21 in the Mutualité to take place and had its police protect it. It allowed the fascist gangs to carry their arms into the hall; it made sure these same gangs were escorted when they carried this material back to their headquarters after the meeting. And it has also been shown that the disposition of the police against the counterdemonstration had been worked out in such a way as to result in serious injuries to the police; all the official denials on this point have not convinced anyone.
Accordingly, the government machinations had the following aims: on the one hand to be able to strike at the Ligue Communiste; on the other hand, within the police, to strengthen an independent trade union favorable to fascism at the expense of the syndicat autonome [Fédération autonome des Syndicats de Police—Autonomous Federation of Police Unions] (which includes the majority of the police) and thus increasingly to push forward the present minister of the interior's conceptions on maintenance of law and order.
The Ligue Communiste's call for an antifascist demonstration was in no way aimed at setting off street fighting or an urban guerrilla operation in which the revolutionary vanguard would substitute itself for a mass demonstration of the working class. On the contrary, the Ligue Communiste's action was aimed at drawing the workers' attention to the potential fascist threat that has been flourishing under the protection of government complicity and at showing that the only way to win victory over fascism is to set up an adequate defense organized by the working class and not to rely on vain appeals to the bourgeois state.
The organization Ordre Nouveau, with its restricted audience and small number of activists, is only the advance guard of fascism. Behind it lurk more disquieting threats, above all the supposed trade union the CFT [Confédération Française des Travailleurs—French Confederation of Workers, a company goon-squad that poses as a union], supported by the employers in order to spread terror in certain factories (like Peugeot at St. Etienne, Citroën, etc.).
Furthermore, the present process of decomposition of the UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la République—Union of Democrats for the Republic, the Gaullist political organization] is giving rise to murky phenomena, to racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations within which is beginning to mount a fascist potential that, finally, could give rise to a mass threat.
The government Messmer formed just after the elections was an attempt to assemble all the energy of a decaying bourgeoisie facing a powerful rise of working masses seeking a socialist solution to the crisis of the capitalist system.
In less than six months, a succession of mass movements has shown that the UDR's victory in the elections was only a Pyrrhic one. High-schoolers and university students took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, challenging the role of the capitalist army. Tens of thousands of women, supported by the overwhelming majority of the population, flouted the infamous law against abortion. The intellectuals and the artists lined up against the "moral order" proclaimed by the minister of cultural affairs. Finally and above all, in all the regions of France, the working class—from the OS [ouvriers spécialisés—semiskilled workers] and especially the immigrant workers, to the most highly skilled—rose up not only for better working and living conditions but against the capitalist order as well.
Temporarily bottled up by the hopes of an electoral victory for the Union of the Left, the rise of the masses burst forward with ever greater vigor.
The most dazzling example, the one most rich in significance, which created a national furor, was provided by the Lip workers at Besançon. Threatened with layoffs due to the announced bankruptcy of this company, the workers at Lip began by setting aside a good number of watches as a guarantee that they would be paid for their work. Then they decided to manufacture new watches and put them on sale at cost-price. And thus began to function, in open violation of bourgeois law, a factory without employers, the equipment and raw materials of which were being used by the workers and the watches produced being sold—the whole thing going on in the context of general sympathy from the workers of France.
Some thousands of men and women thus disregarded capitalist ownership, the employers' authority, and bourgeois law; and the government did nothing about it, for fear of touching off a social explosion.
It was in such conditions that the government decided to move against the Ligue Communiste, whose progress, while still modest, was disturbing. This sort of preventive operation was a matter of striking at the largest far-left organization with the hope that it would find itself isolated from the masses, thus ensuring the success of the operation.
But the French government's calculations went awry all the way down the line. It took only a few days for the trap to be exposed so that the fascist danger and the government's complicity with it were completely brought to light. And, what is far more important, the whole workers movement, and along with it broad democratic layers, denounced the government's maneuver and took up the defense of the Ligue Communiste and its members.
Never before had such unity been shown in France—the Communist party and the Socialist party, the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail—General Confederation of Labor], the CFDT [Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail—French Democratic Confederation of Workers], and FO [Force Ouvrière—Workers Force], the FEN [Fédération d'Enseignement Nationale—National Education Federation], the League for the Rights of Man, all of which had failed to respond when the racist meeting was announced, and the far-left formations all made common cause with the Ligue Communiste.
Who would have thought a few weeks ago that the Communist party, through its daily l'Humanité, would wage an intense campaign and send Jacques Duclos to speak in the CP's name at a meeting against the dissolution of the Ligue Communiste! The minister of the interior went on television to vent his wrath in virulent terms at the general mobilization that rose up against this attack. Finally, thousands of men and women learned the lesson that the Ligue Communiste had wanted to get across: that the struggle against fascism cannot be limited to political denunciation but must involve proletarian action, including physical struggle, to crush such a danger in the egg.
The workers movement and the working masses of France responded with a unanimity rarely seen in the past. Solidarity demonstrations took place internationally, especially in the European countries near France, where the example of May '68 had touched off the greatest response and where the stakes in the situation were seen most clearly.
The French government's plans have been frustrated, but the repression has not been halted. The Ligue Communiste remains dissolved; Alain Krivine and Pierre Rousset are still in prison; many Trotskyist militants are being prosecuted. Solidarity must therefore be pressed forward in France and internationally to force the abrogation of the decree dissolving the Ligue Communiste and the release of those imprisoned, to assure full freedom of expression, of organization, and of demonstration for the revolutionary organizations, especially so that no attack can be launched against the Trotskyist press, and to annul all antidemocratic measures that the French government has taken since May 1968.
But the struggle cannot stop merely with the reestablishment of the democratic rights that have been trampled on by the government's arbitrary acts. The class struggle in France is pointing toward great tests of strength. For the international revolutionary vanguard, the struggle to beat back the government repression will be the point of departure for preparing the workers for these great tests of strength in which they will be confronting capitalist forces made all the more fierce in that they have their backs to the wall and will therefore defend their profits and privileges by any means necessary.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International assures all French militants who are victims of the repression of its total solidarity. The Trotskyist movement in France, created in 1929, has known many ups and downs. It courageously came through the bloody test of the Nazi occupation and the Pétain regime. Dissolved once before, just after May 1968, it surged forth much more powerfully the next year with the founding of the Ligue Communiste. This new test will end with new progress for the Fourth International in France—no one can doubt it.
United front to free Alain Krivine and Pierre Rousset!
United front to force abrogation of the decree dissolving the Ligue Communiste!
United front to break the repression!
Long live the struggle of the French working class, the youth, the working masses, for a workers government laying the basis for a socialist society!