By Marc Lassalle
Since the last European elections in June, France has entered a new political phase characterised by a deep instability and violent attacks against the working class in an overall context of the rising far right. Macron’s gamble, to dissolve the National Assembly and trigger a general election at the end of June to regain a governing majority was a total failure. The new parliament consists of three major blocs: the New Popular Front (PS, PCF, Greens, FI and other smaller forces) obtained a plurality (193 MPs), but far from an absolute majority (289). The RN greatly increased its representation to 125. Macron’s coalition was heavily defeated but maintained a sizeable parliamentary group (164) thanks to the ‘republican front’ where left-wing voters support the best-placed candidate in each constituency against the RN. The traditional right-wing party, the Republicans (LR), heir of the gaullist parties, was reduced to the role of junior partner with only 47 MPs.
While the left parties claimed victory and insisted on their popular mandate to form a government, President Emmanuel Macron spent the summer engaged in a series of delaying tactics. Only at the beginning of September was Michel Barnier (LR) appointed PM. Barnier, 73, a lifelong professional politician, is hardly a symbol of the renewal of political life that Macron promised to introduce. A reactionary catholic, he has cobbled together a hybrid government, combining the most traditional and reactionary wing of LR together with ministers representing Macron’s party and other centre-right allies. The central problem of the government is that it has does not command a majority in the assembly, and therefore could easily fall if the NFP and RN both support a motion of no confidence. Since the constitution prohibits a new general election before the summer, France faces a year of weak government, and opaque and cynical negotiations and parliamentary manoeuvres.
During the formation of the Barnier government, Macron was in daily contact with Marine Le Pen soliciting her tacit support. On several occasions she and Jordan Bardella, the new rising figure of RN, voiced their ambition to keep the government on a short leash, and clearly want to obtain major concessions. This was already clear in Barnier’s first public statement, when he said that immigration is ‘intolerable’ for French society. Interior minister Bruno Retailleau, a former advisor to the arch-reactionary monarchist Philippe De Villiers, has made clear he intends to pass a new anti-immigration law, granting national preference to French citizens (a similar draft law last year was struck down by the constitutional court). Retailleau and Barnier met Italian ministers preparing a ‘hub’ (in reality a prison) in Albania to deport migrants arriving in Italy, although this has also been declared illegal by Italian courts. Retailleau’s claim that ‘civil rights are neither intangible nor sacred’ is an indication of the very real danger posed to millions of workers of non-French origin, and in fact to France’s multinational and multiracial working class more generally.
The government’s first test is to prepare the 2025 budget. In a context of anaemic economic growth and rising state debt, Barnier is searching for €60bn worth of cuts and tax increases. While the initial message was that part of this could come from taxes on large corporations and the super-rich, it soon became clear that the whole manoeuvre is directed against the public sector and the workers. In the current discussions (the budget is currently under debate in Parliament), various reactionary measures are considered: slashing 4,000 teaching posts, cuts to the local government budget, the health system, public sector workers, pensions. While the debate in parliament is chaotic, it is likely that the government will use anti-democratic rules of the Fifth Republic (the bonapartist 49.3 clause of the constitution allows a government to bypass parliament) to pass the budget. This will require the passive support of RN—which in turn depends on major concessions on immigration and spending.
The New Popular Front
Since the elections, the NFP has focused on the question of the government. After weeks of internal negotiations, they appointed Lucie Castets, a high-level official in the Paris local administration, as their candidate for prime minister. After Macron’s choice of Barnier, the NFP denounced a ‘democratic robbery’, with placards proclaiming ‘Macron has stolen our vote’ paraded on demonstrations organised by La France Insoumise. That, however, was both the high point and the end point of the street mobilisation. Since then, the NFP has limited its arena of activity to parliament. LFI proposed a motion to impeach Macron which failed to even be put to a vote. The NFP claims many ‘victories’ in amending the budget law; however, what they do not say is that the final document will almost certainly be the original one, or worse, as the government has both the will and the undemocratic tools to have it approved without a vote, or with the tacit consent of the RN.
An equally symbolic opposition is being organised on the streets by the CGT, the main trade union federation. They oppose the budget law, and insist that the working class should not pay for the crisis, but they limited the mobilisation to a single day of action at the beginning of October, a rather traditional autumn demonstration—and far short of what is needed.
Faced with government attacks, as well as a new wave of factory closures and sackings (180 closures over the last 12 months with 90,000 jobs in danger according to CGT), revolutionaries need to propose a battle plan to the working class. An important factor is the depth and breadth of workers’ illusions in reformism. Last year, millions marched against the pension reform and, according to polls, 80% of the population opposed the ‘reform’. However, the deliberate decision by the reformist trade union leaders not to call a general strike, coupled with the weaknesses of revolutionaries, derailed that movement and led to a defeat. This year, millions of workers turned to the political forces linked with the working class, especially the PS and LFI to stop the RN and obtain a victory at the political level.
This pressure from below explains the quick formation of the NFP, the large mobilisation in its favour, including large demonstrations, the unusual support by CGT, and the millions of votes it secured in the working class and immigrant areas. It also explains why Macron’s original tactic—to split PS or at least a part of it from the NFP to form a centre-left government—did not succeed. Given the support from below, the PS, while divided, decided to play the NFP card, having in mind the strong possibility of new elections within a year.
The far left
Without doubt the most opportunistic position among the radical political groups is that advanced by NPA-Anticapitaliste, led by Philippe Poutou and Olivier Besancenot. They decided to enter the NFP, and Poutou stood under its banner in the general election. In September they were still arguing that ‘the experience of NFP, while fragile, carries within itself the possibility of going beyond the logic of fragmentation of the last decades. The NFP (if we continue and reinforce it) can serve as a framework to this dynamic of unifying and raising the class consciousness embodied in a front and a programme. The beginning of convergence within the NFP of forces of the social movements, and political forces, is a step forward’. (Revue l’Anticapitaliste, no. 159, September 2024). Only a month later, the ‘step forward’ has disappeared, the NFP is referred to in the past tense, and the NPA-A claims instead that we must create ‘frameworks of common reflection and action to build the balance of forces sufficient to engage the struggle against Macron, the government Barnier and RN’. Or, put another way, ‘to impose the urgent measures of the NFP, we know that we can only count on ourselves!’ (L’Anticapitaliste, 723, 3 October 2024).
If this is the case, it is legitimate to ask what is the balance sheet of NPA-A’s participation in the NFP? Unfortunately, no serious analysis is to be expected from these grossly opportunistic leaders whose longstanding ambition to join the ranks of the reformists led them to jettison the entire NPA project. It is easy to predict that they will follow the path of other USFI sections, dissolving into reformism and disappearing into political irrelevance.
The Révolution Permanente group (FT), on the other hand, does recognise the need to propose a political perspective to the workers. However, they orient this mainly towards a reform of the political system:
The preparation of a battle plan that culminates in a general strike to oust Macron and to obtain our most urgent demands must be the priority for a mass movement. … The implication of this is to demand that the power be placed in the hands of a single Assembly, to vote the laws and govern, freed from the control of a Senate, of a Constitutional Council or of the President of the Republic. … Given that the majority of the population still has expectations towards general elections, as it was shown by the upward jump in participation in the general elections, deemed decisive, a single Assembly would accelerate the political education of the workers and popular classes and would facilitate the struggle for a workers government’ (Révolution Permanente, “The political crisis of the Fifth Republic and revolutionary politics”).
The problem with this position, clearly geared towards discussion with the voters and supporters of LFI, is its opportunism and its ambiguity. The Fifth Republic certainly has an antidemocratic, bonapartist character, and certainly many workers are opposed to the politics of Macron and would like to get rid of him. However, the main problem is that what we need is not a ‘more democratic bourgeois democracy’, but a different type of state altogether. If workers have the strength to get rid of the Fifth Republic, they certainly have the strength to create their own organs of struggle and of government, rooted in the factories, workplaces and neighborhoods. To propose the objective of a new democratic system is at best a diversion from other more substantial objectives.
Lutte Ouvrière has a correct analysis of the class character of the Barnier government and of course denounces capitalism. They pose the need for a revolutionary party:
As long as the workers do not build a party for themselves, based in the factories and in the working class areas, a party that does not aim to provide ministers to manage the state of the bourgeoisie but a party of conscious workers, preparing the fight against the capitalist class and its expropriation, their interests will be trampled. (Lutte de Classe, 9 September 2024). However, despite the impressive intervention of LO in the working class, they never set out the transitional demands that can serve to guide the militant vanguard of the working class as to the route from its current struggles to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. In fact they actually deny the validity of such demands in the present conditions, deferring their use to periods of revolutionary crisis.
The position of NPA-R is different. They recognise that deep democratic illusions persist in the working class, but attribute this to the illusions created by the leaders of the NFP. They mainly address the rank and file workers and recognise the need for a type of action programme:
We need a battle plan to “stop the country”. We need to tackle the problem at the root; the bosses’ offensive that deepens the inequalities by lowering the wages, degrading the working conditions, multiplying the job cuts, destroying the public services useful for the people. Only the struggle of the workers and youth can stop this and inverse the balance of forces. Struggles going to the end, without being blocked in the false social dialogue or limiting themselves to the parliamentary calendar. It is in this effort that we must put all our forces, starting now, against a combat government of Barnier-Macron-Le Pen serving bosses in their offensive’. (NPA-R, 9 September 2024)
A programme of action
We share this perspective. However, it is crucial to develop and articulate it, taking into account three considerations:
First, this perspective must be embodied in a real and concrete battle plan, that is, in a series of transitional demands that address the crucial issues of the class struggle today and which provide workers’ struggles with both definite goals and also a method of struggle. This series of demands should be further coordinated into an emergency plan for the workers class, that is an action program.
Among the most urgent demands are:
Stop the job cuts, stop the factory closures. The workers of Michelin in Cholet show the way: strike against the closures, occupation of the factories, link these struggles nationally. We demand the expropriation of these factories under workers’ control.
Make the bosses and the rich pay: after the first round of austerity measures by Michel Barnier, others will follow. The huge state subsidies granted to the private sector must be exposed. The workers in the state sector, in the banks and finance houses, in the private sector must open the books and reveal the huge amount of profit and property accumulated.
Defence of the public services. No to job cuts, no to austerity budgets in the public services. Workers in these sectors must speak out as they are doing in the health sector. They must reveal the real destruction of public services taking place, most notably in the hospitals, in the education sector, in the universities.
Stop deportations, stop racist discrimination, no to national preference, open the borders. The attacks on immigrants’ civil rights will also weaken their organisation and expose them to super-exploitation and police repression. That weakens the entire working class.
Only a major national movement can stop these simultaneous attacks. Separate isolated struggles must be linked together. Committees of action must be set up in the workplaces and in the working class and immigrant areas.
Second, as soon as we address the working class and propose a new series of struggles, a big question will arise. In 2023, millions of workers marched and went on strike against Macron’s pension ‘reform’. That struggle was defeated. Without analysing that defeat and proposing how to overcome that failure, it is impossible to convince the masses to initiate a ‘struggle that goes all the way to the end’.
Third, it is impossible to ignore the illusions in reformism that continue to be held by millions of workers. It is not just LFI planting these wrong ideas in the workers’ heads. Reformism has planted deep roots in the country over almost 150 years, and it is embodied by mass organisations with their apparatuses and their own deep roots in the working class. The recent elections revealed the extent to which reformism lives in the political consciousness of the masses.
We cannot simply ignore these illusions, but must find ways to unmask the reality of reformism, even when—especially when—it pretends to be radical. An action programme should contain specific and concrete demands addressed to the leaders of the mass organisations of the working class, in the first place the CGT. The CGT is a mass union, gathering together the most combative rank and file activists. The headline of a recent CGT leaflet reads: ‘the government is very fragile: we can make it turn back!’ This is certainly true, and we must take CGT leaders at their word. Certainly, we can defeat the government, but it is also certain that we will not be able to do so on the basis of the CGT’s tactics.
In each workplace, in each factory, we must demand that the local trade union leaders, in the first instance those of the CGT, build links with other factories under attack and take concrete steps for united action. At the regional and national level similar demands must be addressed to the higher level of the trade union bureaucracy. We must demand unified dates across the country for demonstrations against the bosses’ attacks and the government, national demonstrations, national days of strikes, up to and including a national general strike, uniting private and public sector, one which is not limited in advance to one day.
Ultimately, we must organise the rank and file to be able to fight for these demands and impose them on the national trade union leaderships where they do not take them up. This will expose in the eyes of the workers the reality behind the reformists’ ‘left’ rhetoric. Similar demands can be raised within the ranks of PCF and in the more militant branches of France Insoumise.
French workers face a serious attack by the Barnier government. However, it is true that the government is fragile, as is the President, and a resolute and coordinated action by the working class can stop it and impose a defeat on him at least as severe as the one he plans for us. Revolutionaries must set up a real battle plan to defeat them, based on the accumulated lessons of the international class struggle, and most importantly taking advantage of the indispensable value embodied in the method of transitional demands which demonstrates to the proletarian vanguard the way in which the struggle ‘to the end’ begins from the partial struggles ‘of today’, and is, moreover, the only certain way to secure a definitive victory. Formulating such a programme of action that addresses these burning questions is the task of the hour. Given its size and politics, the NPA-R can and must take the lead, and in so doing, become a driving force for the creation of this movement.
