29 July 2024
“The president has the power and the duty to call the Nouveau Front Populaire to govern. It is ready.” So declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 7 July after the “left” coalition emerged from the French legislative elections with the largest number of seats for any single electoral bloc and 25 percent of the vote.
The elections ended in a hung parliament with the 577-seat Assemblée Nationale fractured into three political blocs. The Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) finished with 182 seats, edging out President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition with 168 and Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) with 143. Final voter turnout reached 67 percent, marking the highest participation rate in a second round of legislative elections since 1997 and surpassing the 2022 elections by over 20 percent.
Macron rejected Mélenchon’s proposal to allow the NFP to try to form a government, instead asking his ally Gabriel Attal to remain as prime minister until the situation is resolved. The election results represent a significant setback for Macron, who portrayed himself as leading the charge against the far right. In reality, he has governed in direct opposition to popular sentiment, deservedly earning the epithet président des riches. Over 70 percent of the population rejected Macron’s increase of the pension age, which he rammed through without parliamentary approval last year, prompting a powerful strike and protest movement in response (see “French Pension Strikes Rattle Bourgeoisie,” 1917 No.47). He pushed for a massive hike in military spending ($450 billion over the next six years) and proposed deploying NATO troops to Ukraine, despite the fact that three-quarters of French people oppose it. Under his watch, French authorities banned pro-Palestinian protests, led vicious police assaults on Gaza solidarity encampments and smeared those denouncing Israel’s genocide as “antisemitic” and “apologists for terrorism.”
The decision to call early elections hinged on Macron’s belief that French voters, wary of the rising far right, would unite behind him in a front républicain, securing a fresh mandate and bolstering his legitimacy. Even with help from the NFP, which withdrew more than 130 candidates from three-way races “to block the arrival of the extreme right in France,” his electoral wager failed to pay off. The election cost his party dozens of seats, relegating it to second place, and paved the way for Le Pen’s RN bloc, despite coming third in total seats, to finish with the largest share of the overall vote (around 37 percent).
As support for neoliberal “centrists” like Macron evaporates, a wing of the French ruling class is increasingly prepared to turn towards far-right figures like Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella. Eric Ciotti, president of Les Républicains, the traditional Gaullist right-wing party, broke from long-standing party tradition and openly allied with the RN for the election. Ciotti is backed by billionaire media tycoon Vincent Bolloré, with whom he worked closely to propose the idea of a “union of the right.” During the campaign, leading layers of finance capital were openly courting Le Pen as a “credible” alternative to the NFP and what they view as its supposed “hardline anti-capitalist agenda” (Financial Times, 18 June 2024). Attempting to assuage concern from French capitalists, the RN ended up watering down some of its more populist pledges. Bardella backtracked on the proposal for a closer “alliance” with Russia and reaffirmed “support for Ukraine,” pledged to increase the military budget and stand by France’s commitments to NATO, and withdrew his promises to repeal Macron’s pension age increase and immediately cut taxes on essential goods.
In a post-election “letter to the French people,” Macron claimed “no one has won” the election and called to build a “broad gathering” of “republican forces” to form a coalition government, a designation understood to exclude both Le Pen’s far-right RN and Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI). Macron is hoping the tenuous coalition of parties comprising the NFP may itself unravel, with tensions between LFI and other key players, the Parti Socialiste (PS), the Stalinist Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and the Greens (EELV), already evident. Leading figures within the PS, PCF and EELV are no doubt considering the idea of casting Mélenchon and LFI aside as a quid pro quo for governing alongside Macron’s “republican forces.”
Whatever the exact alignment of forces in the next government, whether or not it includes figures tied to Mélenchon and LFI, it will undoubtedly pursue a pro-capitalist agenda and provoke opposition from among the French working class. On 29 June, the day before the first round of the elections, we warned on Facebook:
“In this election the defining political issue facing the French working class is the need for proletarian independence. That requires explicitly opposing voting for the New Popular Front, in both the first and second rounds, and demanding to break the cross-class coalition. Any other position would be a betrayal of the most fundamental principle of class-struggle politics—working-class independence.”
The aptly named Nouveau Front Populaire is indeed what Marxists call a “popular front,” a cross-class political alliance between reformist social-democratic “workers” parties and outright capitalist parties. In this case, pseudo-socialist parties (LFI, PS, PCF) are allied with a number of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, environmentalist and “civil society” political outfits, backed by the leaders of most trade-union federations (CGT, CFDT, UNSA, FSU). These parties stood on a common program and joint ticket, fielding a single popular-front candidate in each constituency for the legislative elections.
The NFP is essentially a broader reincarnation of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES), the cross-class electoral coalition involving the same main political parties that ran in the 2022 legislative elections. That bloc imploded last year when internal divisions over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza emerged. Like NUPES, the NFP was explicitly built as a multi-class political lash-up from the outset, appealing to unite “all the forces of the humanist left, trade unions, associations and citizens” (Le Monde, 11 June 2024). While all components of the NFP have fundamentally pro-capitalist political appetites, the inclusion of the bourgeois Greens in the coalition cemented the class-collaborationism defining the project.
The unexpected resurrection of widely reviled former Socialist Party President François Hollande from political retirement to run on the NFP ticket in Corrèze was similarly designed to reassure investors at the Euronext Paris stock exchange that they had “nothing to fear” from an NFP government. In the lead-up to his successful presidential bid in 2012, Hollande had boasted to financial elites from the City of London:
“Today there are no Communists in France. Or not many … the left was in government for 15 years [under Mitterrand] in which we liberalised the economy and opened up the markets to finance and privatisations. There is no big fear.”
—Guardian, 17 February 2012
Despite attempts by the leaders of the NFP to portray the alliance as a “total break” with Macron’s policies, the common platform hammered out in June fundamentally centered around defending the interests of French imperialism. While it contained some reforms to appease the left (investments in public services, price caps on basic necessities, increasing the minimum wage, scrapping the pension reform, recognizing the state of Palestine), it promised not to increase France’s deficit and—although pledging to increase government revenues through a tax on companies’ super-profits and a restored wealth tax—at no point proposed any encroachment on capitalist property. It also called for strengthening the military police and intelligence services and promised to “unfailingly defend the sovereignty and freedom of the Ukrainian people,” including providing Kiev with arms deliveries and proposing to send “peacekeepers” (i.e., imperialist troops) to Ukraine (nouveaufrontpopulaire.fr).
Revolutionary Marxists stand for working-class independence from all wings of the ruling class and oppose giving political support of any kind to class-collaborationist alliances with the bourgeoisie. In 1936, Trotsky wrote:
“The question of questions at present is the People’s Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the People’s Front. In reality, the People’s Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism.”
—“The Dutch Section and the International” (15–16 July 1936), in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935–36) [emphasis in original]
Yet instead of principled opposition to all expressions of popular frontism, the vast majority of the ostensibly Trotskyist tendencies in France gave varying levels of support to the NFP in the elections, ranging from joining or openly backing it to refusing not to vote for it.
The right-wing rump of the Pabloite Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA, aka the NPA–A) and the Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI) managed to enlist as candidates officially running for the NFP, but many others gave support from the sidelines.
Despite operating as a “revolutionary” oppositional tendency inside the NPA, Tendance CLAIRE had some reservations about voting for the NFP, but in the end called for “the victory of the Popular Front,” incredibly claiming “we have no choice.… The only electoral solution to prevent the extreme right from exercising power is the victory of the left” (tendanceclaire.org, 12 June 2024). They promised to actively campaign for the LFI candidates within the NPF and during the second round they backed proposals for a “Republican front against the RN” by calling for NFP candidates finishing third to pull out:
“In the constituencies where the NFP candidates came in third place and can remain in the second round (if they received the votes of more than 12.5% of registered voters), we call for their withdrawal, so there is no vote for the RN, and for a vote for the candidates who can beat the RN and its allies.”
—tendanceclaire.org, 1 July 2024
Tendance CLAIRE sought to portray their class betrayal as “a purely tactical question” and criticized tendencies on the French far left fielding their own candidates against the NFP as mired in “dogmatism.” Despite acknowledging that the NFP’s program “falls well short of the reformist programs of the socialist and communist parties of the 20th century” and “includes almost no anti-capitalist measures,” they nonetheless described a prospective popular-front government as a “great victory” which could apparently “restore hope” and “open the path to major mobilizations” (tendanceclaire.org, 16 June 2024).
The response by Révolution, the French section of the newly formed Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), successor to the IMT of Alan Woods and the late Ted Grant, was essentially similar, though a bit less enthusiastic:
“Révolution, which will found a Revolutionary Communist Party next fall, calls for people to mobilize in the streets and vote for the candidates of the ‘Popular Front’ on 30 June and 7 July. However, we want to make several comments and proposals here.”
—marxiste.org, 13 June 2024
Those “comments and proposals” amounted to little more than meaningless warnings that young people and workers should “not trust” the popular front in power and instead “rely upon their own strength alone,” combined with appeals to “join the Revolutionary Communist Party.” The RCI even suggested that Mélenchon’s LFI might itself be the vehicle for revolutionary change:
“The only way for the rise of the RN to be halted would be for LFI to break with the PS, PCF and Greens and carry forward a radical programme of breaking with capitalism through class struggle means.
“In the end, the political equation for these coming weeks is quite simple.
“To stop the advance of the RN, the leadership of LFI will have to move clearly to the left, and mobilise youth and workers on a radical programme through an anti-capitalist struggle, including massive demonstrations. Any other strategy will benefit Le Pen.”
—marxist.com, 10 June 2024
Given they had already pledged their votes, the RCI’s call to “break with PS, PCF and Greens” was not advanced as a condition for support to LFI but rather as a toothless pressure tactic (at best) or political cover for supporting what for Trotskyists is unsupportable: the popular front.
For all the self-aggrandizement about the trailblazing role of the new “Revolutionary Communist International,” the RCI is clearly continuing the long-standing Grantite/IMT tradition of tailing mass movements and giving unprincipled political support to cross-class formations. If Trotsky was correct in saying that the popular front “offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism,” it is clear the RCI’s “tactical” vote for the popular front places it squarely in the tradition of Menshevism. Trotsky suggested that such politics belongs in “the dustbin of history.”
A number of self-proclaimed Trotskyist groups opted to field their own candidates in the election, including Lutte Ouvrière (LO), Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste–Révolutionnaires (NPA–R), Révolution Permanente (RP) and the Parti des Travailleurs (PT).
Lutte Ouvrière, which ran candidates in almost all legislative constituencies on a militant-sounding platform, accurately noted that limiting “the struggle to the electoral field will not allow for the danger of the extreme right to disappear.” They also provided a general criticism of the popular front and French left in government: “each time the left-wing parties exercised power, they bowed to the will of the big bourgeoisie by attacking the popular classes, they betrayed and disoriented the workers, and the extreme right progressed” (lutte-ouvriere.org, 13 June 2024).
However, their critique of the NFP failed to mention the unprincipled class collaborationism that fundamentally defines the project. The purpose of omitting this minor detail became apparent when leading Lutte Ouvrière spokesperson Nathalie Arthaud suggested LO supporters were “free to vote for left-wing candidates or to abstain” during the second round:
“Lutte Ouvrière voters may want to vote for a New Popular Front candidate against the RN. If this is the case, they can do so without being upset.
“As for those who do not want to give a free pass to the candidates of the left, including ex-ministers and ex-presidents, they can also without feeling guilty refrain from voting and in this way express their distrust of the entire political caste of the bourgeoisie and state institutions.”
—lutte-ouvriere.org, 1 July 2024
What political bankruptcy! LO did not advocate a vote for the NFP because it knows that, once in power, a popular-front government will betray the working class and inevitably provoke widespread opposition, responsibility for which LO would like to avoid. But nor were they willing to tell their base not to vote for the popular front, which millions of French workers (mistakenly) see as some kind of radical alternative to Macron. Instead, LO supporters were “free” to make up their own minds and, regardless of their decision, do so without getting “upset” or feeling guilty. What kind of political leadership is this?
The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste–Revolutionnaires (NPA–R), centered on third-generation Pabloites claiming the “revolutionary” mantle of the NPA after the organization split in half in 2022, ran dozens of candidates on a basically reformist platform, sprinkled with calls for “overthrowing the capitalist system” and the need for “urgent revolution!” In their election material, their initial advice to French workers was: “Vote for revolutionary candidates, of the NPA–Revolutionaries where we stand, and of Lutte Ouvrière everywhere else.” They warned about having “not the slightest confidence in the electoral promises” of the popular front, but after their own and LO’s candidates were eliminated in the first round they called to vote for the “left-wing parties” of the NFP in the second round out of “solidarity” with their “comrades in struggle”:
“Where nevertheless a candidate of LFI or the PCF faces the RN, or where, exceptionally, a candidate of other left-wing parties would justify it, we will call for a vote for these candidates.”
—npa-revolutionnaires.org, 1 July 2024
Révolution Permanente (RP), the French section of the Trotskyist Fraction–Fourth International (TF–FI), offered up a similar perspective. RP ran a candidate in the Seine-Saint-Denis district on the outskirts of Paris and called “in the rest of the constituencies, for a critical vote for the candidates of Lutte Ouvrière” (revolutionpermanente.fr, 27 June 2024). RP criticized the “NFP’s logic of class conciliation,” opposed the “Republican front in the service of the real enemies of workers” and even called for “an independent workers’ policy.” Yet in the end they also supported a “critical vote” to the NFP in the second round, though only for those candidates of the popular front belonging to the “workers’ movement”:
“While denouncing the NFP project, we do not dismiss all of its components. EELV and especially the PS are bourgeois organizations deeply integrated into the regime of the Fifth Republic…. no vote can be given to them.
“For the other organizations that make up the NFP, the local details and the context of the second round can justify a critical vote for their candidates.”
—revolutionpermanente.fr, 3 July 2024
The Parti des Travailleurs (PT), centered on a current associated with the late Pierre Lambert, also ran candidates in the first round. Their election propaganda called for “a real break with this regime,” which for the PT apparently means to “convene a Constituent Assembly by which the people can establish an authentically democratic regime … capable of responding to the demands of the working people” (parti-des-travailleurs.fr, 23 June 2024). During the second round, this “break” also involved backing candidates from the NFP’s “workers’ parties”:
“On 7 July, without approving the program of the New Popular Front, and without conditions, the Parti des Travailleurs calls for voting for the candidates from the parties of the workers’ movement, presented by the New Popular Front!”
—parti-des-travailleurs.fr, 30 June 2024
The Groupe Marxiste Internationale (GMI), heirs to Stéphane Juste’s split from the Lambertists in the 1990s, put forward a more orthodox-sounding line. The GMI denounced the class collaboration of the workers’ components of the NFP that “called to unite with bourgeois parties” and “put themselves at the service of French capitalism.” The GMI wrote:
“Workers’ united front! No republican front, nor popular front: no vote, in the first or the second round, for the candidates of the bourgeois parties, whether racist, sovereignist, Gaullist, ex-Macronists, ecologists…!”
—groupemarxiste.info.org, 25 June 2024
Days before the second round, they reiterated: “Not a single vote for the bourgeois parties!” (groupemarxiste.info.org, 3 July 2024).
This is in fact a soft form of support to the popular front, since, like the organizations discussed above, it suggests voting for candidates from the workers’ component of the NFP is permissible as an expression of working-class solidarity. Of the 546 candidates running on the New Popular Front ticket in the first round, most were representatives of the social-democratic reformist parties with only 92 Greens. Therefore, a vote for the “workers’ component” of the NFP in the vast majority of constituencies was not the exception, but the rule, and meant de facto backing the entire popular front.
More fundamentally, the NFP was a single political entity, fielding a single candidate in each constituency and running on a common program. A vote for any candidate of the NFP, whether from a reformist workers’ party or bourgeois or petty-bourgeois formation, was a vote for the success of the popular front as a whole and a betrayal of working-class independence.
Ultimately, the GMI proved incapable of bringing themselves to say: No vote to the New Popular Front! Instead, they proposed a “proletarian action program” that called for “action committees” to coordinate a “united front of all workers’ organizations, parties and trade unions, of all organizations of the oppressed against Macron and Le Pen” (groupemarxiste.info.org, 3 July 2024). In the absence of principled opposition to any support to any candidate of the popular front, the GMI’s “proletarian action program” can only disorient those workers looking for clarity on how to move the class struggle forward.
The prize for most convoluted position must surely go to the Ligue Trotskyste de France (LTF), French section of the International Communist League (ICL, aka Spartacists). They sought to apply a veneer of principled opposition to popular frontism onto a solicitous orientation towards various French far-left groups formally outside the NFP:
“The only way to stop the rise of reaction is to start building a revolutionary workers’ pole in direct opposition to left-wing republicanism and the popular front. The immediate central task for revolutionaries is to use the elections to fight for a break with the New Popular Front, and therefore necessarily with La France Insoumise (LFI) which constitutes its backbone, in order to confront the bourgeoisie.”
—Le Bolchévik [supplement], 19 June 2024 (emphasis in original)
Of course. Yet the LTF’s approach boiled down to calling upon LO, NPA–R and RP to set aside their differences and form a “workers’ bloc” to provide “a real working-class alternative.” They even suggested the “workers’ alliance” might be some kind of ongoing electoral lash-up lasting long enough to contest the next presidential elections scheduled for 2027:
“It is urgent to constitute a real working-class alternative. We call on the NPA–R, Révolution Permanente and LO to form a workers’ alliance in these elections, against the right and the popular front, that is to say the new NUPES of the PS–PCF–LFI. We must immediately forge such an alliance this week in time for the legislative elections, but also in order to prepare for the next presidential elections and more broadly to prepare a real working-class alternative to reaction.”
—Le Bolchévik supplement, 11 June 2024 (emphasis in original)
After the Spartacists’ proposal received no traction, particularly from LO, they criticized LO, NPA–R and RP for doing “everything except opposing the popular front” and then … voted and actively campaigned for them anyway. Under the guise of “exposing” the leaders of these groups, the LTF is actually pushing the fantasy of a far-left lash-up providing an alternative to the popular front, calling on rank-and-file members to implausibly “transform your campaigns into a starting point to forge a pole of proletarian opposition to Mélenchonism and the popular front!” (Le Bolchévik supplement, 19 June 2024).
After wandering aimlessly for decades in the forest of sectarian abstentionism, the Spartacists have recently emerged, rediscovering the tactic of critical support. They do not, however, know how to use it to advance a revolutionary perspective. Calling on reformists and centrists of various persuasions to simply unite to become a “revolutionary pole” (especially when those reformists and centrists are pushing thinly veiled popular-frontism) can only create illusions, not dispel them. The neo-Sparts’ voracious appetite for critical support targets—whetted by the liquidationist logic of their recent disavowal of their revolutionary period—even led them, in South Africa, to call for votes to the bourgeois Economic Freedom Fighters in the recent elections. The ICL leaders view themselves not only as adept tacticians but as the only people actually fighting for revolutionary leadership. The reality is far less heroic, far more mundane: they are flailing towards Pabloism.
The leaders of the Nouveau Front Populaire have portrayed the alliance as “a new page in the history of France,” but there is nothing new about popular frontism in France, which has a legacy of class betrayal going back over a century. Today’s NFP is not much more than a watered-down version of its namesake, the Front Populaire that governed the country in the late 1930s. That class-collaborationist coalition with the “democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie was able to head off a semi-insurrectionary general strike movement by diverting it into the dead-end of defending bourgeois democracy. The justification used in the 1930s for allying with a wing of the ruling class, much like today, was the struggle against fascism.
In February 1934, the mobilization of several thousand fascists and monarchists brought about the downfall of the French government and the overthrow of Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. His ruling Radical Party administration was replaced by the semi-dictatorial National Union government under former president Gaston Doumergue—a coalition comprising all shades of political representation of the ruling class, including far-right elements, while excluding Socialists and Communists. The French working class immediately responded with an upsurge of struggle and radicalization that cut across traditional party lines.
Fresh off the disastrous ultra-left policies of the “Third Period” (1928–33) that facilitated the rise of fascism in Germany, the panic-stricken Soviet bureaucracy in Moscow now swung towards pursuing “anti-fascist” alliances with capitalist “democracies,” in particular Britain and France. Anxious to demonstrate to the bourgeoisies of the democratic imperialist powers that it could contain revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe, the Comintern instructed its national sections to enter into electoral alliances with social-democratic reformists as well as outright bourgeois parties (i.e., popular fronts). In June 1934, the PCF proposed a non-aggression pact with the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), forerunner to the Parti Socialiste, agreeing to forego mutual criticism and limit action to defense of French “democracy.” The following year this was expanded to include Daladier’s Radicals, the liberal-democratic party of French imperialism. Together, these parties set up an explicitly cross-class electoral bloc, the Popular Front, which would eventually run on a joint ticket and common program in the May 1936 legislative elections.
Trotsky, who lived in exile in France from 1933 to 1935, followed the rise of popular frontism closely. After the Popular Front (aka, People’s Front) between the SFIO and PCF was enlarged to incorporate the bourgeois Radicals, Trotsky wrote:
“the People’s Front in its present form is nothing else than the organization of class collaboration between the political exploiters of the proletariat (the reformists and the Stalinists) and the political exploiters of the petty bourgeoisie (the Radicals).”
—Whither France?, 26 November 1935
While opposed to making any concessions to popular frontism, Trotsky by no means dismissed the impulse among the base of the French proletariat towards unity in the fight against fascism and right-wing extremism. This was clearly an important sentiment pointing the way forward. But instead of encouraging independent action, the popular front politically tethered the French working class to the ruling class and channeled its revolutionary élan into propping up bourgeois democracy.
To free workers from the shackles of popular frontism and lead the anti-fascist struggle, Trotsky proposed “committees of action.” These committees would be open to not only to workers from various political parties, trade unions, and industries, but also to other social layers suffering from the capitalist crisis—“civil service employees, functionaries, war veterans, artisans, small merchants, and small peasants” (France still had a sizable poor peasantry at the time). The committees would serve as an “apparatus of struggle” to assert the class interests of the workers, while exercising significant influence over their potential allies in the poor farmers and petty bourgeoisie. This would help win over the lower stratum of middle-class supporters of the Radical Party as well as neutralize a component of the social base of the fascist movement.
As an expression of “the revolutionary representation of the struggling masses,” the committees of action would come to form an alternative class pole to the popular-front government around which the toiling masses could cohere, within which revolutionaries would seek to gain a hearing and channel the struggle towards workers’ power. Initially, the vast majority of members of the committees would naturally come from the ranks of the SFIO and PCF—precisely those parties participating in the popular front—which would put immense pressure on their leadership to “eject the bourgeois middlemen (the Radicals) from the ranks of the People’s Front,” i.e., break the class-collaborationist coalition. If the Socialist and Communist leaders refused to do so, they would be exposed as class traitors.
Trotsky argued that it would be “incorrect” to describe the committees of action as equivalent to soviets (i.e., proletarian institutions of a new state), “as France today is still considerably removed” from a direct conquest of power by the working class. Although he acknowledged that “under certain conditions the Committees of Action can transform themselves into soviets,” Trotsky maintained that:
“Committees of Action at their present stage have as their task to unite in a defensive struggle the toiling masses of France and thus imbue these masses with the consciousness of their own power for the coming offensive.”
—Whither France?, 26 November 1935
That “coming offensive” was not long in the making. The Popular Front decisively won the May 1936 elections and formed a government under the Socialist leader Léon Blum. Upon taking power, Blum assembled a coalition government with the Radicals in which 15 of the 35 cabinet members came from the bourgeois party. The remaining ministries went to Blum’s Socialists, while the PCF, left without a cabinet post, backed the government from within the Chamber of Deputies.
The new popular-front government was firmly committed to the defense of private property, but the working class and the peasantry nevertheless saw the election as a victory. They undertook a series of militant actions and occupations in May–June which culminated in a general strike involving two-and-a-half-million workers and posing a pre-revolutionary situation:
“These are not just strikes. This is a strike. This is the open rallying of the oppressed against the oppressors. This is the classic beginning of revolution.
“The strike has stirred, revitalized and regenerated the whole colossal class organism. The old organizational shell has by no means dropped away. On the contrary, it still retains its hold quite stubbornly. But under it the new skin is already visible.”
—Whither France?, 9 June 1936
Trotsky now moved from calling for committees of action to advocating the creation of soviets:
“The new organization must correspond to the nature of the movement itself. It must reflect the struggling masses. It must express their growing will. This is a question of the direct representation of the revolutionary class. Here it is not necessary to invent new forms. Historical precedents exist. The industries and factories will elect their deputies who will meet to elaborate, jointly, plans of struggle, and to provide the leadership. Nor is it necessary to invent the name for such an organization; it is the soviets of workers’ deputies.”
Fearful of losing control of their base and alienating their bourgeois bloc partners in the popular front, the Stalinists and Socialists, along with the leaders of the CGT, scuttled the strike to defuse the pre-revolutionary situation and reestablish the authority of the Blum government. The role played by the Communists in using their political authority to demobilize French workers was particularly pernicious. Imploring them to “return to work,” Maurice Thorez, national secretary of the PCF, declared:
“One must know how to end a strike as soon as essential demands have been met. One must even know how to agree to compromises in order not to lose any strength and, more notably, not to make the fear and panic campaigns of reaction any easier.”
—L’Humanité, 12 June 1936
The French working class was persuaded to end the strike and factory occupations and instead seek a negotiated compromise with the employers’ association. This led to substantial, though ultimately short-lived, concessions from the capitalists and the introduction of a series of significant labor reforms such as the right to strike, collective bargaining, wage increases and the 40-hour work week.
With the Popular Front having weathered the May–June strike wave, it began to re-establish bourgeois law and order and move against the working class. Keen to prevent further radicalization in France and avoid alienating its imperialist allies, the Blum government signed a “non-intervention” pact actively blocking assistance, munitions and volunteers to the Republican side fighting Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It suppressed publication of revolutionary journals in France and imprisoned French revolutionaries. In February 1937, police opened fire on anti-fascist supporters of the Popular Front in Paris. That same month, the government put a “pause” on its previous commitment to social reforms.
With the working class increasingly disillusioned with the government, and the “workers’ component of the popular front” already having served its purpose in stabilizing the situation, the French ruling class no longer needed the framework of the Popular Front to govern. In June 1937, Blum was ousted as prime minister and eventually the Socialists were forced out of the cabinet. The following year, the Popular Front coalition completely unraveled. A Radical Party government with Daladier once again prime minister was installed, under which the Communist Party was banned, the 40-hour work week and labor reforms repealed, martial law declared and large-scale strikes crushed. Not long after the German invasion in May–June 1940, a sizable section of the French ruling class backed the Vichy regime and collaborated with the Nazis. Ultimately, the Popular Front had so paralyzed and disoriented the working class and politically strengthened bourgeois reaction that, far from preventing the rise of fascism in France, it paved the way for it.
Trotsky’s observation that “the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch” and provides “the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism” is no less true today than it was in his time.
The Nouveau Front Populaire is a class-collaborationist bloc politically subordinating the French working class to the bourgeoisie. Despite its pseudo-socialist trappings, the NFP’s pro-capitalist leadership seeks to “responsibly” administer French imperialism on behalf of monopoly capital, not to overthrow it. By intentionally invoking the legacy of the Front Populaire, the reformist misleaders atop the NFP reveal their political bankruptcy. Exposing their own political bankruptcy are those ostensibly Trotskyist organizations that have politically backed the modern-day Blums and Thorezes. While the class struggle in France today is less acute than in the 1930s, the NFP is no less disastrous. If it ascends to power, whether ruling as a minority government or in a coalition, it will inevitably betray its working-class base; its very existence is a betrayal.
A labor movement guided by a militant class-struggle leadership would mobilize to directly confront and decisively defeat the fascists inside and outside of the Rassemblement National. United-front actions involving organized and unorganized workers, immigrants, marginalized groups and other potential targets of fascism are crucial in halting their rallies and marches. It is through such labor-centered action that the most effective resistance can be mounted, and sentiment for this already exists within the French working class. In the wake of the RN’s victory in the European elections in June, hundreds of thousands immediately mobilized in protest across the country. But, instead of directly confronting the fascist threat, the official leaders of the trade unions and reformist workers’ parties are channeling social discontent into the dead-end electoralism and class-collaborationism of the Nouveau Front Populaire.
The central task of the French working class is to build an independent revolutionary party committed to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the creation of a workers’ republic and the Socialist United States of Europe. There are thousands of subjectively revolutionary militants in France, many of them currently organized in the various pseudo-Trotskyist groups. An important first step is to cohere a Bolshevik nucleus to frankly assess the programs currently on offer to the French working class and win these militants to a genuine communist program in a process of revolutionary regroupment. Even a small party of a few thousand, armed with such a program and the tactical understanding of how to advance it within the working class, could make rapid headway in the context of the continuing degeneration of global capitalism.
Related articles
‘Pink Tides’ & Popular Fronts: Revolutionary strategy in Latin America (1917 No.47)
French Pension Strikes Rattle Bourgeoisie (1917 No.47)
Police Violence in France (1917 No.47)