The barricades of May 10, 1968, in Paris have opened the way for a victorious advance of the socialist revolution in Europe. The West European capitalists thought that they were forever rid of the specter of communism. Because of the failures of the traditional leaderships the workers movement in Europe experienced nothing but political stagnation. A long period of prosperity produced many illusions that so-called neocapitalism had succeeded in overcoming the classical contradictions of the system which Marx disclosed. The mass workers organizations and above all their leaderships were more and more poisoned by reformist gangrene.
In many cases, Social Democratic parties formally renounced the articles in their constitutions defining them as workers parties and committing them to replacing capitalist society by a socialist one. Wilson and Willy Brandt, who came to power when the first symptoms of economic difficulties were appearing, did nothing but implement an antiworking-class policy.
The mass Stalinist parties (France and Italy), guided by the policy of peaceful coexistence in the international sphere and of peaceful, electoral and parliamentary roads in the domestic arena, joined in the reformism of the social democrats and were ever watchful to stifle any current or grouping inside the CP or to its left which advocated the slightest militancy. The very minimal "de-Stalinization" which followed Stalin's death had no other effect for the leaders of these parties than to accentuate the reformist character of their policy. Insofar as possible they maintained the monolithism of their organizations. There was no room for workers democracy in the groups they controlled.
The Social Democratic and Communist leaders did practically nothing to aid the colonial peoples in liberating themselves from imperialism -- when they did not participate in governments organizing the repression of freedom movements.
I.
But neither the years of economic "prosperity" nor the meager improvements in the living standard of the West European workers in any respect altered the exploitive nature of the capitalist system. In this prosperity, broad layers of workers, above all young workers, enjoyed only marginal means of subsistence. The advance in the standard of living, the level of skills, and culture made still more odious in their eyes a system whose absurdity and inhuman character took on new dimensions at a time when technological progress made possible abundance and the flowering of every human potential.
Imperialism conceded formal independence to most colonies but has continued its exploitation in neocolonialist forms. The courage of the Cuban revolutionists, the impetuousness of the black youth in the United States who have thrown themselves into a struggle for freedom, and the heroism of the Vietnamese people in unswervingly continuing their revolution against the most powerful aggressor army in the world have increasingly inspired a new youth vanguard. And this new vanguard has been wresting the banner of active solidarity with the revolution of the colonialized peoples from the hands of the traditional opportunist organizations.
At the first signs of a slowdown in the capitalist economy, of advancing technological unemployment, and increased unemployment among the youth, the contradictions of this artificially stabilized society burst into the open. Neocapitalism imagined that it had a limitless future. The bourgeois, reformist, and neoreformist politicians carefully followed the polls to ascertain what slogans would enable them to gain a few percentage points of the vote. The sociologists and other official pedants put the computers to work to describe the society of the 1980's, the 1990's, or of the year 2000. But what neither the capitalists, the rulers, nor the apparatus men of the workers organizations foresaw came to pass. Revolt surged up spontaneously from the student youth, which in Paris and throughout the whole of France, was immediately supported by the high-school youth and an important part of the young workers.
There has been much talk in recent days of the Gaullist government's errors. Even if it had displayed a little more "finesse" in these May days, the explosion which was gathering force would have occurred sooner or later.
And what a magnificent explosion! This youth whose elders had given it no political example of militancy in the last ten years spontaneously rediscovered all the old lessons of the proletarian revolutions. The red flag was its banner. It had no other. It literally tore the red-white-and-blue flag of the French bourgeoisie to pieces to leave nothing but the red of socialist revolution. It created committees elected by all the participants in the struggle, without having studied the meaning of the famous "soviets" which, starting from Russia, went round the world a half century ago. It quite naturally instituted the broadest workers democracy, allowing all tendencies to speak. It rejected all the slanders used to stifle the voice of the revolutionary Marxists. It made its judgments on the basis of program and concrete proposals alone, rejecting all carry-overs from the monolithic heritage of Stalinism. This youth showed those who denigrated the romanticism of "grouplets," of this "dozen or so wild-men," to quote the now historic expression of a cynical and disillusioned French minister of education, that at certain times the role of the vanguard can be decisive and that, far from being a thing of the past, barricades can rise anew.
Paris rose up with an irresistible power, just as representatives of American imperialism and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were beginning their talks. Governments whose conceptions smack more of James Bond than of a historical outlook of the slightest seriousness saw in these events a machination to block the negotiations. Paris and the French working masses are not "neutral" diplomats; they are for the victory of the Vietnamese revolution. By responding to the government's provocations and to the attacks of its repressive forces they have opened the way to realization of the essential precondition for real peace in Vietnam.
The barricades of Paris have broken down the barriers which had contained the socialist revolution in Europe. The call of the barricades will be heard in all the big cities as it was twenty-five years ago. Students in Berlin, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, and London have organized solidarity demonstrations. In Rome the cry has rung out "Create two, three, many Parises." In Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, students have extended their struggle against the bourgeois university, the bourgeois state, and capitalist society.
The factory occupations by the French workers will spur similar actions in several European countries. The struggle against the vicious "emergency powers" laws in West Germany will broaden toward direct action by the workers.
The barricades of Paris and the French factory occupations will also find echoes in the bureaucratically deformed or degenerated workers states of East Europe. They will show that there is only one alternative to these detested conservative bureaucratic regimes and that it does not lie in a "liberalization" and progressive adaptation to the social democratic and "neutralist" mentality of the rising technocratic strata but in a return to the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, a return to the program of soviet democracy, of management of the state and the economy by democratically centralized workers councils, and active solidarity with the advancing world revolution.
We warmly salute the new revolutionary vanguard arising in the workers states which, despite a repression of mounting harshness, raises the banner of revolutionary socialist democracy. We salute Comrades Kuron and Modzelewski, who are again in prison. We salute the Soviet comrades who have appealed to progressive and revolutionary opinion in Europe. We pledge to them our support and declare to them that their cause will be taken up by the new revolutionary vanguard in West Europe, that it is in solidarity with them.
II.
The student uprising and the factory occupations have opened the road to the revolutionary ascent in France. But it must be understood that the battle is not yet won, that maneuvers to cheat the masses of their victory will multiply, that the bourgeoisie still has considerable forces at its disposal to once more prevent the revolutionary energy of the people from finally overthrowing the bourgeois state and the power of capitalism.
Thus far a crushing defeat has been inflicted only on the Gaullist "strong state," from which it indubitably will never recover. But now the question is posed of what will replace it. The French bourgeoisie, one of the most astute in the world, was momentarily disconcerted by the student movement, whose breadth and revolutionary potential it failed to understand. Now it finds itself faced with a mass strike. It will ply its wits to pull all the classic maneuvers to divert this movement, in which it was so successful in 1936 and 1944-46.
One can be sure that the most intelligent bourgeois strata will be ready to make concessions in regard to the purely social demands (higher wages, less working hours, broader rights for social delegations). The crime of the CGT and the CP is that they also seek to divert the movement toward new "Matignon agreements," [made between the unions and the bosses under Blum's Popular Front government in 1936] to which the employers will accede once they are sufficiently frightened by the profound upsurge sweeping France.
On the political plane, the Pompidou government is no more than a corpse whose burial has been temporarily delayed. Whether it is overturned in the Assembly, dismissed by de Gaulle, driven from power by new street demonstrations, or ousted by the anticipated elections, its days are numbered. With it, or shortly following, will collapse the whole "strong state" which emerged from the military coup d'état of May 13, 1958.
But its replacement is already on the scene: a new popular front government based on the FGDS and the CP. This government would put a legal stamp on the social concessions and the few neocapitalist reforms that the bourgeoisie would grant to calm the discontent of the working and student masses. The objective role of this government -- whatever the intent of this or that grouping within it -- would be to break up the working-class bloc which has today arisen against the regime, to appease the petty-bourgeoisie and the most conservative layers of the working class, to isolate the student and worker vanguard from the broader masses -- in sum, to assure the recession of the revolutionary movement, thereby destroy the masses' acquired confidence in their own strength, and then to unleash a repression against the isolated vanguard.
It is only on these conditions that the impetus can again be broken as it was in 1936 and 1944-46. The revolutionary upsurge would then give way to a period of confusion and retreat. And this time the threat of a dictatorship whose ferocity would mirror the fear which now grips the bourgeoisie would almost certainly shape up.
But, contrary to 1936 and 1944-46, there is a new factor in this revolutionary upsurge: the existence in Paris and many provincial cities of an extensive and resolutely anticapitalist young vanguard which the traditional social democratic and CP apparatuses cannot recapture in the immediate future. The revolutionary Marxist component and influence in this vanguard are growing rapidly.
In these conditions, there is a real chance that the revolutionary upsurge will not be quickly broken. This depends essentially on two factors: first of all that in the initial ascendant phase hostages are taken that remain like so many time bombs in the disintegrating system, and which not even the evacuation of the factories, the workers' resumption of labor, and the fall of the Gaullist government and new elections could disarm. In brief, elements of dual power must be created in the factories and neighborhoods, in the form of committees assuming the powers acquired de facto in the present phase of the struggle, and which the government cannot take away in the immediate future without provoking a test of strength that would lead to a new broadening of the revolutionary upsurge.
These rights on the political plane must be supervision of the French radio and television broadcasting network to assure objective reporting; supervision of the telecommunications system, the central postal bureaus, the telephone and telegraph system, radio communications; control of the high-school, technical-school, and university systems by the students themselves; the creation of nuclei of armed workers and students popular guard units to protect the offices occupied by the masses against police repression. A major political objective must be the dismantling and dissolution of all the repressive police forces, odious in the eyes of the people, such as the CRS [Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité -- Republican Security Companies -- an elite military state security force] and the Gendarmes Mobiles [mobile paramilitary police], the parallel and secret police, etc.
In the economic sphere, the rights which must be secured are workers control of production; the right of veto by workers committees of all proposals to close plants or lay off personnel; the opening of the company books; the elimination of banking secrecy; the formulation of an economic and social development plan for a socialist France which would guarantee full employment and radical alteration of the consumption standards based on the expropriation and collective appropriation of the major means of production, to be democratically managed by the producers themselves.
To this end, these committees must federate as quickly as possible at the local, regional, and national levels in a national congress of factory committees and peoples committees in the schools and neighborhoods. This will be the core of the future Socialist Republic of France.
This congress must launch an appeal to all the workers and peoples of Europe to begin the socialist revolution and to actively demonstrate their solidarity with the French socialist revolution in progress. All attempts by international finance to strangle the revolution economically, or by NATO to crush it militarily, can be thwarted only if this international solidarity functions in a deep-going way and aims at the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe.
The other prerequisite for thwarting the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and the traditional apparatuses of the workers movement which have been coopted into bourgeois society is a rapid coalescence of all revolutionary Marxist forces into a powerful revolutionary vanguard party based on a revolutionary Marxist program. The de facto unity in action of various revolutionary currents which is emerging in the struggle is a promising step in this direction. But provisional accords on fragments of a program do not suffice for the victory of a revolution. Clarity must be shed on all the great strategic and tactical problems posed today for the revolutionary movement. Helped along by experience in action, this clarification which is in progress can and must culminate in the amalgamation of all revolutionary militants in a united party of the French socialist revolution.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International appeals to all the vanguard militants and to all the workers and students of France and calls on them to display the maximum revolutionary daring. Never forget Saint-Just's words: "Revolutionaries who make revolutions only halfway are bound to dig their own graves." Do not let the fruits of your victory be stolen from you as in 1936 and 1944-46.
There is still a large gap between the revolutionary maturity of the youth vanguard and the level of consciousness of the workers. But with a correct political orientation and a constant exertion in action, organization, and agitation this gulf can be bridged; the majority of the working class can detach itself from the neoreformist line of the French CP which it still reluctantly follows. It can, in its turn, move into revolutionary action. You have a unique chance to assure the breakthrough of socialism in Europe. Do not let this chance slip through your fingers.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International reminds all vanguard militants and workers in Europe and throughout the world of their historic responsibility. The tocsin of socialist revolution has begun to sound in France. Let us assure that its reverberations will be heard for a long while in all countries.
Long live the French socialist revolution!
Long live the Socialist United States of Europe!
Long live the world socialist revolution!