ON DE GAULLE'S COMING TO POWER The reign of the French Fourth Republic has ended. It foundered in an extraordinary scene of confusion, decomposition, and cowardice, the result of the unprecedented capitulation of the democratic parliamentary forces of the centre and the left, including a large part of the Socialists, and of the flagrant impotence of the Communist Party to mobilize the masses, running from the scandalous and criminal support of the Pfimlin government, which coldly opened the path for de Gaulle, to spasmodic last-minute "leftist" While cries of triumph were resounding, for a victory that was after all unexpected, from the reactionary scum - Parisian gilded youth, fascist hordes, paratroopers, gendarmes, soldiers, Algerian settlers - demonstrating from the Champs-Elysées to the Forum of Algiers, the immense popular masses were confused, beoutraced by events and the resignation of their The scenario for bringing de Gaulle to power, prepared Behs the scene in ver sin the u with out a ch behind the Pflimlin used the full powers and the state of emergency, which the Socialists and Communists had granted him, to tie down the working class and coldly prepare, in "legality" and at the least possible cost, the passing of the power to de Gaulle. In this task he was activelv seconded not only by the political apparatuses of the bourgeoisie, including the puppet President of the Republic, not only by the administrative bureaucracy of the bourgeois state, but also by the treacherous leaders of the Socialist Party à la Guy Mollet, and the subtler but no less treacherous attitude of the Communist Party. Disregarding the constitutional majority which the vote of the Communist Party gave him by a broad margin, Pflimlin imposed his own fall at the desired moment, so as to bring about the "crisis" in which the appeal to de Gaulle, "the providential man, " became almost inThe President of the Republic, backed, with rare exceptions, by the general staff of the political leaders of the right, the centre, and the left, took it on himself to finish things off. Thus the whole scandalous support given since the beginning of the crisis by the Communist Party to the government of the Republic," to "its army,
"its administration, " served fundamentally only to open the way peacefully, by parliamentary paths, to the Bonapartist and dictatorial power of de Gaulle ! The de Gaulle solution clearly expresses the impossibility in which the great majority of the French bourgeoisie finds itself to rule by classic parliamentary means. For he bourgeoisie, democracy and the republic are noi organizations of principle but simple means, valid only under certain circumstances. Let these circumstances change, let the need be felt for a strong executive power exercised without hindrance, and we immediately see the machine of the bourgeois state rise up above the impotent parliament, to be entrusted to the "strong" hands of some Bonaparte or other, on a military or outright fascist basis. It was through such a process that the Weimar Republic let itself be strangled by Hitler, that the Austrian Republic sank into the sanguinary regime of Dolfuss, that Republican Spain was crushed by Franco, that the France of the Popular Front ended up under Daladier's regime of reaction and war. The present shipwreck of the French Fourth Republic is the result of the crisis of the regime of bourgeois democracy, for which the proletariat was not able to find a revolutionary outcome. It expressed the military, economic, political, international impasse into which the capitalist regime in France had got itself, as a result of the disasters which that regime experienced during the war and the colonial wars which it has never stopped waging since that time. The most direct cause of the fall of the republic in France is to be found in the strength of the Algerian revolution which is leading Algeria to independence and is tolling the knell of all that is left of the French colonial empire.
52 De Gaulle is the last hope of the French bourgeoisie for carrying out the liquidation of the empire under conditions preserving at least some of this bourgeoisie's vital economic interests, while maintaining and consolidating its regime in the metropolis. It is even not excluded that the definitive balance-sheet of the de Gaulle experiment may be, not so much a 'harder" colonial policy than that of (for example) the "socialist" Lacoste, but a firm dictatorship in France, capable of imposing the inevitable concessions to the colonial revolution, and of compensating for them to some extent by an increased exploitation of the metropolitan masses. WHO "BETRAYED" THE REPUBLIC? The bourgeoisie, by burying the moribund republic with its own hands, did not exactly "betray" : it did not betray its own class interests. Pushed by its most dynamic elements, who brutally knocked aside the theatrical props of a henceforth outmoded democratic décor, it brought on stage the "strong" Bonapartist power - based on the real force required at the present moment for the sateguard ot its interests: the army. The army, backed by the mass of the settlers in Algeria, in reality only precipitated the sole solution to which the colonial policy of the bourgeoisie as a whole was inexorably leading, including those petty-bourgeois strata who are represented in the Socialist Party. Both so as to carry on the war against the rising colonial revolution and so as to face up at home to the economic, political, and social consequences of such an enterprise, condemned to failure, a "strong" government was necesThus the true cost of the prolongation of the war in Algeria was fatally, as it were, dictatorship in France itself. The proletarians of that country and of the whole world will have to meditate on this bitter lesson: wars of oppression against the colonial revolution can under present conditions result only in the strengthening of reaction in the home countries. To allow the bourgeoisie to conduct a historically doomed struggle against colonial peoples means, far from maintaining the standard of living and the liberties of the metropolitan masses, to end up inexorably in the superexploitation of those masses and the loss of those Since the Second World War the colonial peoples have never ceased to fight for their independence and to win in spite of their practical isolation and the almost total lack of active support by the metropolitan proletariat. This grave split between the colonial revolution and the proletarian movement in the metropoleis could not continue except at great cost to the proletarians of the capitalist countries. The example of France is now before us as evidence. Faced by the loss, inevitable in spite of everything, of its colonies, the imperialist bourgeoisie will try to compensate for its losses at the cost of its own metropolitan The grave inaction that the metropolitan masses have so far shown toward the struggle of their brothers in the colonies is due above all to the chauvinist, opportunist, and class-collaborationist education and policy of their traditional Socialist and Communist leaderships.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL The European and world Social-Democracy, exceptions, has shown itself in practice to be bound up till death with the imperialist bourgeoisie. It has not seen the way to lift its little finger to help the colonial revolution, and it solidarized itself practically with the executioners and traitors in the style of Lacoste and Guy Mollet, who for months on end carried on the war against the Algerian revolution, opened the path for de Gaulle, and yet still form part of the Socialist InterThe left-centrist tendencies that exist in various Socialist Parties have the task of drawing all the necessary conclusions from the French experience by finding the way back to revolutionary Marxism. Without a well-thought-out revision of chauvinist and opportunist policy, without unconditional and effective support of the colonial revolution, without a sincere abandonment of class-collaborationist practices, without recourse to the revolutionary extraparliamentary organization and action of the masses, without the clear will and perspective of setting up in a united front with the other workers' formations a genuine workers' and peasants government, the Socialist Parties within which these tendencies are active will be irremediably condemned, as in France, to act as grave-diggers not only of socialism but also of bourgeois democracy. As for the Communist Parties, belated champions of "Scialism, they will and "have plenty or oppos to "new" -to meditate on the validity of these ways and on the example oftered them by the experience of the French Communist Party. The "new ways" in France, favorite sended the plato of pert am star democto worse
And this with the practical support and acceptance of the French Communist Party, which voted the full the state of emergency, and the dictatorial constitutional reform asked for and prepared by the Pflimlin government. And though the French C P -after having been humiliated in the most contemptuous manner by the bourgeoisie, which rejected its votes -pretended at the last minute to turn its policy "left," to denounce the betrayal(?) of Pflimlin, to call the masses to "vigilance" and "action" - the one as vague as the other - this must not be allowed to cover up the reality of its policy: at no moment did this party believe in the possibility of barring the road to dictatorship by the revolutionary action of the masses, and at no moment was this party really capable of mobilizing the class along these lines. This was clearly demonstrated in practice. The tardy "left turn" of the French C P's policy had no meaning other than to camouflage, in the eyes of its own members and the working class, its policy of retreat and impotence. Really to tight against a dictatorship based on the army, what was quite plainly necessary was a mobilization of the class, carried to its highest pitch, namely, an insurrectional general strike, with the mass uprising of armed workers, the occupation of the factories, the railway stations, the airfields, and the streets and squares. In reality, in such a case, it was a question of the be-. ginning of the Revolution. Such was the historic alternative placed before the French working class and its leaderships: to face up to the counter-revolution already begun and fight it by the Revolution. The leadership of the French C P, a pack of narrow-
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL minded petty bureaucrats, corrupted to the marrow of chiled head othe Revoltin opportus naturaly so-
- was naturally not prepared, materially or ideologically, for such an eventuality. The Kremlin's attitude toward de Gaulle, furthermore, makes one think that orders were transmitted for the French C P to go easy with "the general," the Kremlin was wagering on a possible "anti-Americanism" (!) on his part. Anyway, in the best of cases, when the leadership of the French C P, sunk up to its neck in the swamp of the "new ways,' saw - no farther away than the end of its own nose - the spectre of the counter-revolution on the march, it could only bluff by means of actions as spasmodic as they were impotent. What is more, its long practice of chauvinistic, opportunist, and class-collaborationist policy had really isolated it from the masses, themselves affected by this policy. One cannot with impunity practise for years on end a line cultivating chauvinist fermentations and reformist systematically discrediting the revolutionary forces and means of action of the working class, and then think to be able, at a given moment, to make an appeal for the revolutionary action of the class and have it find an echo. The experience of the French Communist Party demonstrates to what a point these parties, once revolutionary, have in reality degenerated into vulgar parliamentary formations, for which the masses still vote but rarely mobilize themselves. THE RESULTS OF DE GAULLE'S VICTORY AND THE TASKS OF THE PROLETARIAT De Gaulle is not exactly and cannot be a new Hitler. Neither by his national base nor by the international context that surrounds his experiment, can his regime support such a comparison. It would, however, be equally erroneous to underestimate the consequences of his vicThis quite plainly constitutes the first important postwar defeat in Europe, whose unfavorable results will be felt in the evolution of the situation in Spain, Germany, Italy, and Europe in general. Furthermore, the Algerian revolution, isolated up till now from the active support of the French labor movement, runs the risk of being even more so. This would not fail to have weight in a political differentiation within the F L N by favoring a rightist national wing to the disadvantage of a left tendency more aware of the social aspects of the revolution, and more indomitable in its opposition to imperialism. The essence of the Gaullist dictatorship, its main support, is at present the army. Outside of Algeria, where the settlers provide a genuine fascist mass base, its "popular" bases in the metropolis are still extremely slight. On the other hand, the international context is still marked by the advance of the colonial revolution, the strengthening of the workers' states, the difficulties -now including economic difficulties - of imperialism, i e, by a relationship of forces that is still unfavorable to imperialism. The disparate social forces which want to take shelter behind the symbol of the dictatorship, the complex and contradictory character of the problems to be solved, will soon bring into the open the real difficulties that the dictatorship will have to face. In the case that it
53 might be obliged to show itself "liberal" toward the colonial revolution and proceed to concessions towards it, it would run the risk of encountering from the very beginning the active opposition of the settlers and other indomitable "ultras" of "Great France." In the case where, on the contrary, it would line up with the positions of the settlers, it would run the risk of sinking deeper into the war and the general impasse. Its eventual economic and political severity toward the toiling masses in France furthermore threatens to thaw out definitively their relative apathy, in favor of a militant regroupment. The financial difficulties arising from the continuation of the war in Algeria and of the deterioration of the trade balance, added to those of the foreign policy of the dictatorship toward its allies and toward European institutions, can also undermine the stabilization of the regime. But what will above all determine dictatorship's stability, strength, and power, is the ability of the proletariat o reorganize itself with a view to a tenacious resis tance culminating in a revolutionary offensive for a workers' and peasants government in France. The choice facing France is not republic vs dictatorship, but revolution vs counter-revolution. The bourgeoisie in its vast majority buried with its own hands a republic which was no longer convenient to it as a political system of governing. Faced by this class solution, by military Bonapartist dictatorship, the proletariat can oppose it only by the power of the workers and peasants. Those intermediate solutions to which petty-bourgeois ideologists and incurable optimists are clinging have lived out their time in France - and that for a whole It is no longer possible to go backward without thus in fact settling into bourgeois dictatorship. The dictatorship has come about through lack of a mobilization of the masses carried to the highest pitch. Only such a mobilization in the future will bring about the collapse of the dictatorship by opening up the perspective of a democratic socialist republic in France. It is necessary, with patience and tenacity, to get prepared for a new Resistance with its path lighted by this perspective. It is necessary to rebuild the united front in resistance committees. It is necessary to extend colLaboration in action to the Algerian workers in France, brothers in the fight, vanguard of the struggle against French imperialism. It is necessaru to drive out of the Socialist Partu and the Communist Party the treacherous or bankrupt leaderships, the Mollets and Thorezes! It is necessary to strengthen the revolutionary Marxist tendency in order to provide the masses with a leadership capable. of assuring victory tomorrow. It is necessary to fight step by step against the wiping out of liberties, for the end of the war and for the independence of Algeria, and against any lowering of living standards. It is necessary to brighten the partial daily combats by the perspective of armed insurrection that will overthrow the dictatorship and install a Workers' and Peasants' Government in France!
THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL Milan, 1 June 1958
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