[lbo-talk] The relative independence of the masses

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at rogers.com
Wed Jun 8 15:54:13 PDT 2005


Turbulo wrote:

"Unlike you, however, I don't think the conservatism of the union bureaucracy and mass reformist party leaders merely reflects the attitudes of the base. The leaders, IMO, have positions of their own to defend. This assumption is confirmed by my own very limited trade-union experience, but can be tested more logically, I think, by examining the few post-war occasions on which the majority of workers actually did break with reformism. For brevity's sake, let's confine ourselves e to the most famous episode--France in 1968.

[...] "So here the case is pretty clear cut. The workers abandoned their "pragmatic wariness" in favor of revolution, and their reformist leaders did not follow them, but subverted them...This drama has had many different enactments in the 20th century, and you can't understand it without appreciating the reformists' role as capitalism's defenders of last resort." ------------------------------------------------ My reply:

It's possible that, given the mood of a large part of the French working class, a revolutionary leadership could have persuaded it to try and seize economic and political power in its own name. But that would have meant civil war, no? All insurrectionary general strikes arrive at this crossroads. Were the French workers prepared to go this far, even recognizing that these situations gather a momentum of their own? Would they have won a decisive showdown with the French and international bourgeoisie? If they tried, and even failed, would they still have precipated a European socialist revolution? The events are far from memory, but - and this won't come as a surprise - I no longer subscribe to this interpretation, which is still held by the Trotskyists, anarchists, and others on the left such as yourself. Or, at least, I now require more proof than the Transitional Program.

My recollection is that the Gaullists - hence, the bourgeoisie - felt they had enough reliable troops (and NATO forces in reserve) to reoccupy the factories by force, to declare a state of emergency, to dissolve the National Assembly, and to call new elections - which they then went on to win, ahead of the parties pledged to a "people's government".

You lay the heavy responsibility for this outcome on the thin shoulders of the PCF. But the PCF was not the Bolshevik party from which it claimed descent. It more resembled the Mensheviks, whom the Bolsheviks successfully displaced at the head of the revolutionary Russian working class. So my question is: why did the same revolutionary process not unfold in France as it had earlier in Russia? Why did the LCR and the other smaller parties not supplant the PCF - if not in '68, then subsequently? The existence of a mass reformist party like the Mensheviks wasn't an obstacle to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 - this was, and still is, far left orthodoxy - so why was it considered THE decisive obstacle in 1968?

My own view in retrospect is there was no revolution because the conditions were evidently not there for a revolution. The French workers and farmers (and soldiers), unlike the Russians in 1917, had peace, land, and bread - not enough clearly to satisfy them, but enough to ensure that they would not shunt aside their traditional leaders and move beyond the tempestous protests of 1968 to forcibly sieze power.

MG



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