November 21, 2023 –
From World Socialist Web Site
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The emergence of a global movement of mass protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza marks a historic stage in the class struggle. This movement is objectively directed against all capitalist governments that support the State of Israel against Gaza. Calls to mobilize workers internationally—in the US, Belgium, Spain, Turkey and Italy—to block arms deliveries to Israel are intensifying, while NATO is already at war with Russia in Ukraine and Syria.

French Communist Party (PCF) National Secretary and Member of Parliament Fabien Roussel shakes hands with France’s President Emmanuel Macron after talks at the presidential Elysee Palace, in Paris, Monday, June 21, 2022. [AP Photo/Ludovic Marin]

A race is on between the escalation of the class struggle and the plunge of bourgeoisies into a third world war. This reveals not only the immobility of the trade union bureaucracies of the NATO imperialist powers arming Israel (US, Germany, the UK, France) but also the political abyss separating the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its French section, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), from the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left parties.

SEP activists interviewed leaders of the main pseudo-left parties in France who were participating in union-led pro-Gaza demonstrations. These interviews for WSWS shed light on the untenable and reactionary arguments underpinning the national politics of these parties in the current crisis:

  1. They acknowledge Israel’s massacre of Gazans but refuse to call for international strikes to stop arms shipments to Israel, arguing either that it is not necessary or that they are too weak to do so.
  2. They propose occasional national mobilizations, dominated by trade union bureaucracies that negotiate with Macron’s imperialist police state, severed from the links with workers’ struggles in other countries needed to stop the genocide and war.
  3. They derive this orientation either from the false theory of “socialism in one country” advanced by Stalin against the Left Opposition founded by Trotsky in 1923, or from parties that have broken with Trotskyism to ally with Stalinist bureaucracies.

The SEP rejects all these untenable positions. Mobilizing the international working class against genocide and world war is both possible and necessary. Parties that claim they are too weak to do so, while having received millions of votes in various elections, reveal their political bankruptcy. The SEP calls, on the contrary, for the preparation of the mobilization of the working class, in France and internationally, through strikes and a political struggle against the arms deliveries to Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

Stopping the genocide and war requires the formation of grassroots organizations and the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. This would allow the unification of workers’ struggles, the blocking of industry and the toppling of capitalist governments complicit in genocide. The fundamental weakness of the current movement, dominated by trade union bureaucracies, is that it does not fight against the imperialist governments of NATO, which support the genocide, even though the number of protesters continues to grow with each isolated mobilization.

The SEP asserts that the objective conditions exist to mobilize the working class in France and internationally, to block the economy, stop the genocide, and strip power from the national capitalist warmongers. This directly poses the question of the international socialist revolution.

To realize this potential, however, it is necessary to build not only fighting organizations in the working class but also an international revolutionary leadership opposed to the various national political currents linked to counter-revolutionary bureaucracies. The tendency in France that must be built in this sense is the SEP, which defends the Trotskyist politics of the ICFI against Stalinism and the petty-bourgeois revisionism of the pseudo-left.

The role of the counter-revolutionary Stalinists of the PCF and the PCRF

In the pro-Gaza demonstrations in Paris, WSWS journalists met with bureaucrats from the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and their political satellites. Ian Brossat, the spokesman for the PCF and a senator from Paris, told the WSWS that he defends “the necessity of a ceasefire. We cannot let the Palestinian people be massacred like this.”

Ian Brossat, PCF senator and spokesperson

Brossat euphemistically described Macron’s overt support for Netanyahu during his trip to Israel as Macron’s “silence” on Gaza. Regarding Macron’s policy, he said, “We have a France that today is very silent, very discreet, and is not sufficiently offensive for the necessity of two states, Israel of course but a Palestinian state, too, which must be free and sovereign.”

On the working class calls in the US, Belgium, Turkey and beyond to stop Israel’s arms shipments, he briefly said, “It’s to their credit.”

But when the WSWS asked if the PCF and trade union leaderships would call on workers in France to join this international movement, Brossat refused to take a position. He limited himself to repeating that the PCF calls for occasional street demonstrations: “As far as the Communist Party is concerned, we are at this demonstration and we will be at all the mobilizations that allow us to express the necessity of a ceasefire, of peace.”

The WSWS also interviewed Franz and Marie, two members of the Revolutionary Communist Party of France (PCRF), which broke away from the PCF to align with the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The PCRF defends Stalin’s crimes—the Moscow Trials and the assassination of the Old Bolsheviks, the Great Purges of 1936-1938, and Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. It thus justifies its support for the political immobility that the trade union bureaucracies are trying to impose on workers.

Franz said, “We fully support the Palestinian popular resistance that is organizing in Gaza and the West Bank. The Macron government, like the French bourgeois imperialist state in general, is in total support of Israel.” He also platonically applauded the call to stop arms deliveries to Israel: “These are forms of class struggle that must be carried out, in the sectors of weapons production as in the sectors of circulation, so that these deliveries do not occur.”

But when asked about the possibility of calling on workers to bypass the trade union bureaucracies and join the international movement to block arms shipments to the Gaza genocide, Franz insisted it was impossible. He said, “In several localities where we are established, we have discussions with trade union leaderships. But it’s more with trade union leaderships at the local level … We’re not going to have the pretension of trying to discuss with the national confederal leadership of the CGT.”

Marie tried to justify this capitulation to the Gaza genocide by citing Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country.” She rejected the construction of an international revolutionary movement: “We are against the theses of Trotskyism … We are for national revolutions in each country, while the Trotskyists say that it will only happen on a global level. We say no, it can happen in certain countries.”

Marie

Asked about her opinion on the validity of the theory of “socialism in one country” after the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, Marie defended Stalinism. She claimed that the dissolution of the USSR was the fault of the partial criticism made in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev of the mass murders committed by Stalin against Marxists in the Soviet Union.

She said, “From Khrushchev’s report in 1956, we’ve been in a downward slope. Now we see in the Soviet Union what is happening … There have been a lot of lies told about Stalin, we tried to bring down the application of his socialism. He was on the right path.”

These comments from the PCRF and the PCF underscore that in the final analysis, the blockage of a working class struggle against the genocide in Gaza has its roots in a nationalist support for the political genocide carried out by Stalin against the Bolshevik and Trotskyist movement.

The Anti-Trotskyist role of LO and the NPA

Not all organizations intervening in the pro-Gaza demonstrations defended such an openly Stalinist nationalist position. Most descend from various petty-bourgeois renegades from Trotskyism. But these forces work closely with the Stalinist apparatuses in trade union and academic circles, acting to block a mobilization against the war, Macron, and the genocide in Gaza. This is notably the case with the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) and Workers’ Struggle (LO).

The NPA descends from forces led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel who split with the ICFI and Trotskyism in 1953. Rejecting the Trotskyist analysis of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, the Pabloites concealed how the Stalinist apparatuses dissolved workers’ committees and resistance forces after World War II, in order to block a socialist revolution during the fall of the fascist regimes. Pablo and Mandel called for dissolving the Fourth International through “sui generis entryism” into Stalinist and nationalist organizations.

Pabloist militants founded the NPA in 2009 by rejecting any affiliation, even purely symbolic, with Trotskyism, and by launching calls to recruit Stalinist, social-democratic, or anarchist leaders into their organization.

WSWS interviewed Damien, a railway worker and member of the national leadership of the NPA. He said, ‘What’s happening in Gaza is a horrible massacre, anyway we’re not the only ones to denounce it. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people in the world denouncing the ongoing massacre. Concretely, this is an operation of ethnic cleansing … The Macron government is complicit, even responsible like all imperialist governments on this planet. He went to Israel to support Netanyahu’s policy.”

Damien, a member of the NPA leadership

When asked about calls to mobilize the working class in France and internationally against the genocide in Gaza, Damien said, “We stand in solidarity with these initiatives. These videos [of protests] go around the world every time.”

However, having proclaimed international workers’ solidarity against the genocide, he, like Brossat of the French Communist Party (PCF), refused to call for mobilizing workers against the genocide and arms deliveries to Israel. He is limited to proposing sporadic street demonstrations called by the trade union bureaucracies: “We, in any case, call for participation in all ongoing mobilizations. So, of course, to come out en masse in the streets. … The step before us is to make these demonstrations more massive. That’s the stage we’re at.”

The same position comes from Workers’ Struggle (LO), a group founded in 1956 that advocates building a national movement in France. LO rejected Trotsky’s call for building the Fourth International and continue to denounce French Trotskyists who intervened in the workers’ resistance movements in Europe during World War II. LO also insists that the 1953 split between the ICFI and the Pabloite tendencies oriented towards the Stalinist bureaucracies was not of principal importance.

WSWS interviewed Pascal, a leader of LO, who equated the atrocities of the Israeli army with the Palestinian uprising against the illegal blockade of Gaza. He told WSWS, “Following the odious attack by Hamas on October 7, the Israeli government’s response is a warlike one. We are witnessing the massacre in Gaza.”

Pascal outright denied that a genocide is underway in Gaza, saying, “We talk about a massacre, today we see the figure of 11,000 dead in Gaza with tens of thousands injured. There are clashes of settlers with the support of the Israeli army, that’s it. I would not speak of genocide but of massacre.”

Pascal, a leader of LO in the Paris region

Pascal distanced himself from the policies of NATO powers towards the war, attributing them solely to the financial interests of arms manufacturers: “Macron stands behind the State of Israel, he talks of peace but has chosen his side. French imperialism is behind American imperialism, it’s total support for the State of Israel. … Obviously, the arms capitalists live off the existence of conflicts.”

When the WSWS asked why trade union apparatuses do not call for strikes to block arms deliveries to Israel, Pascal answered, “I have no idea. Today’s demonstration is called by all left-wing parties, unions, associations.”

However, he firmly rejected the idea that LO could call on its millions of voters to mobilize to block arms deliveries to Israel. He said, “We get votes in elections, but ultimately we are a small party. We don’t have a high street presence for the working class in France to fight tomorrow, to struggle to end this conflict.”

In reality, both the NPA and LO have received millions of votes in numerous elections during which the capitalist media falsely presented them as “Trotskyists.” Their refusal to fight to mobilize this support in workers’ struggles against genocide and war demonstrates that they conduct their politics within the framework of “social dialogue” between the national trade union bureaucracies and Macron’s police state. But it is precisely this narrow and rotten national framework that must be broken to stop the war and genocide in Gaza.

Lambertism and La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon

Finally, the WSWS interviewed several leaders of the Lambertist tendency in pro-Palestinian mobilizations.

These parties emerged from the Internationalist Communist Organisation (OCI), which was the French section of the ICFI from 1953 to 1971, a position now held by the Socialist Equality Party (PES). In 1971, the OCI split with the ICFI and broke with Trotskyism to participate on a national perspective in the building of the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS) of François Mitterrand and the Union of the Left between the PS and the PCF. One of its members, Lionel Jospin, became the PS prime minister of an austerity PS-PCF-Greens government from 1997 to 2002.

The most prominent former OCI member today is probably Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon, a former PS minister in the Jospin government who now leads La France Insoumise (LFI). He received nearly 8 million votes in the 2022 presidential elections, as the urban working class electorate sought an alternative to Macron and the neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen.

WSWS interviewed JĂ©rĂŽme Legavre, a member of the Lambertist Independent Workers Party (POI) and LFI deputy in the National Assembly, at a pro-Gaza mobilization.

Asked about the Israeli offensive against Gaza, Legavre said, “What is unfolding before our eyes, besides the fact that it is a massacre and an unspeakable carnage … We are witnessing a campaign of cleansing and ethnic purification. I am totally and unconditionally on the side of those who, from the start of the bombings, have demanded an immediate ceasefire.”

Legavre added that Macron is conducting “a policy of support for the policy of the Israeli government, across the board.”

JĂ©rĂŽme Legavre, a member of the Lambertist Independent Workers Party and LFI deputy

When the WSWS asked if he thought a government that supports a genocide could be legitimate and what LFI wanted to do, Legavre suggested parliamentary action: “The legitimacy of the Macron government, there’s a lot that could be said. … We will be absent [at the next protest] and file yet another motion of censure” against Macron in the National Assembly.

WSWS noted that LFI’s motions of censure in the Assembly are systematically rejected because LFI only has a small minority, and then raised the question of mobilizing the working class in the struggle against the war.

Asked why French trade union apparatuses launch no calls to mobilize workers internationally to stop the war, Legavre replied, “I don’t know, I have no answer to that. There is a clear position … they are on the line of a ceasefire.”

When WSWS raised that MĂ©lenchon has 8 million voters, concentrated in the working class districts of major French cities, and asked why MĂ©lenchon does not call on his voters to strike against the genocide, Legavre replied, “It is not a call from MĂ©lenchon for a general strike that would have provoked the general strike, but there is one thing that is sure. It is he who has gone the furthest.”

When the WSWS asked if the difficulty LFI has in calling for a strike and for an international struggle is linked to the presence within it of forces like François Ruffin, who work with Macron and call for support for Israel, Legavre replied that it had no importance: “I have not followed. I know there are controversies on this ground. But right now, a people are being massacred. So frankly, these little quarrels, I find them trivial and I don’t give them any importance. Ruffin, I don’t care about.”

WSWS also briefly interviewed Daniel Gluckstein, the assistant of the late Pierre Lambert, the historical leader of the OCI during its split with the ICFI. Gluckstein led a split from the POI as it allied with MĂ©lenchon. Gluckstein’s supporters are now grouped in the Independent Democratic Workers Party (POID), which covers the left flank of the POI and MĂ©lenchon.

Daniel Gluckstein, leader of the Lambertist POID

When Gluckstein realized he was facing a journalist from the WSWS, he hysterically denounced David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of WSWS and the US Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and refused the interview.

He said, “I don’t give interviews to David North! We are a democratic and workers’ organization. You are what you are. I don’t give interviews to David North!”

This verbal outburst underlines Gluckstein’s charlatanism. It is impossible to defend the historical record of Lambertism, its alliance with the discredited bourgeois PS, and its follow-the-leader attitude towards the national trade union apparatuses, as French imperialism and its allies intensify their wars and support for a genocide in Gaza. Thus Gluckstein, who is aware of the criticisms made of Lambertism by the ICFI and the French PES, is even obsessed with the person of David North.

But he carefully avoids mentioning the ICFI or the French PES in the POID press, in order to block any serious discussion of political and historical issues within his own party. That is why he is terrified by the presence at a demonstration of a WSWS reporter who simply wants to ask him questions.

The hallmark of a revolutionary period is that the course of events unmasks political charlatans and posers like Gluckstein and his political colleagues. The global movement of workers and youth against the genocide in Gaza, the intensification of the global war waged by NATO, social inequalities, and the rise of police repression conflicts at every point with the pro-capitalist bureaucracies. It imposes the necessity of a political break with the nationalist and anti-Trotskyist servants of these apparatuses.

The political program that corresponds to the objective necessity of an international revolutionary struggle emerges from the defence of Trotskyism by the ICFI and PES.



Source: Wsws.org

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