The movement against raising the pension age in France now demands the fall of the Macron regime. Picture: NPA
‘France has entered a Marxian state of pre-insurrection. Orderly protest over the retirement age has mutated into a deeper crisis of the regime.” That’s how the Telegraph newspaper’s world economy editor Ambrose Evans‑Pritchard, described the situation of strikes and protests last week.
Some socialists in France also speak of a “pre-revolutionary period”, a “revolutionary crisis” or “revolutionary potential”. Are they right, and if they are how do we go from mass struggle to revolution?
Certainly there is more than a simple trade union battle over pensions taking place. Ten days of actions called by the unions have seen huge strikes and mobilised millions on the streets. But also sections of workers, fuelled by determined organisation at the base, continue indefinite strikes in parts of refuse collection, refineries, energy, docks, ports and transport.
Young people are mobilising in larger numbers than ever, and the government was last week in retreat from its plans to impose compulsory national service. “We said to ourselves that adding an ingredient to an explosive cocktail was not a good idea,” explained a ministerial adviser.
Last Thursday, outraged at state repression, tens of thousands of people took part in more than 165 demonstrations nationwide against police violence. Predictably some faced—police violence.
The Russian revolutionary Lenin, writing at the start of the First World War, put forward some symptoms of a revolutionary crisis. It had, he said, to be “impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change”.
This is important because splits at the top act as “a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth”. But there also has to be a determination for “the lower classes not to want to live in the old way”.
Another feature is that “the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute”. And as a result “there is considerable increase in the activity of the masses”.
These are not a list that you can tick off against social reality. How much division at the top, how much pain, how much mobilisation? And as Leon Trotsky stressed, each of these factors interacts with the other.
“The more decisively and confidently the proletariat acts, the better will it succeed in bringing after it the intermediate layer, the more isolated will be the ruling class, and the more acute its demoralisation. And, on the other hand, a demoralisation of the rulers will pour water into the mill of the revolutionary class,” he wrote.
A revolutionary crisis is not simply the endpoint of a growing social movement. It’s a result of the intersecting relations between classes. And it’s also a moment when, the real divisions in society are revealed.
People learn lessons in struggle about the hostility of bosses, police, judges, media and, government—and the solidarity of allies. Trotsky also said that revolutions were not about reaching some point on a proletarian struggle thermometer. They were a moment of “the direct interference of the masses in historical events.”
A revolutionary crisis develops because of what the exploited and oppressed do in a situation where tensions have ripened to an extent where what they do matters profoundly. To say there is potential doesn’t mean that a revolutionary uprising is immediately on the cards today in France. It indicates that the sweep of resistance is great enough to set in train a process that points towards revolutionary conclusions.
Forcing out Macron, for example, would show it is possible to win change beyond elections and formal political mechanisms.
The key is for revolutionaries to be strong enough to advance demands that bring together economic and political struggle through the method of class organisation. They have to be independent of the trade union leaders and the reformist political parties. The aim is to make workers aware of their own potential power and to lead away from reliance on false hope in parliamentary manoeuvres.
The best demands are those that liberate workers from the straitjacket of “realism”. There need to be intensely practical and immediate fights, and those that reach further. Land, peace, bread and all power to the workers’ councils is an example from 1917 in Russia.
Bringing down Macron would direct attention toward abolishing the fiercely undemocratic constitution of the Fifth Republic which allowed the president to impose the pension assaults by decree. This has to set off a process of discussion throughout the working class on what will replace it.
As well as defeating the attempt to raise the pension age, workers have to fight to reduce it. Freeing themselves from the bureaucratic narrowness of agitating only about pensions, workers have to call for pay rises for all. They have to struggle for the full rights to picket and protest, and the removal of the laws that allow the state and corporations to order some strikers back to work with the threat of fines and jail.
This raises the question of leadership. This doesn’t mean that if only we had a revolutionary socialist at the top of the CGT union federation there would now be an insurrection in France. Leadership has to be implanted in substantial sections of the working class.
Lenin sees the party as what differentiates a revolutionary situation from a revolutionary crisis. It is the instrument that doesn’t just line up a collection of important issues but welds together the fight on all fronts around the spine of workers’ power.
At the same time as fighting over workplace issues, revolutionaries say workers have to confront the anti‑migrant Darmanin law, and all the measures that oppress and brutalise Muslim and black people.
At times of deep crisis, the state and its forces become the strategic target. The state is the intersection of political control and the economic dictatorship of big corporations. To undermine state power there should be demands such as the abolition of the ultra-repressive Brav-M (Motorised Brigades for the Repression of Violent Action) unit and the removal of the cops’ armoury of grenades and gas.
Crucially all of these demands are realisable only through the systematic growth of rank and file organisation both in individual workplaces and by coordinating between workplaces.
If all these possibilities were fulfilled today it wouldn’t mean socialism would be achieved overnight. But workers would start to see alternative sources of power and decision-making that could destroy and replace the capitalist state. Everything that diverts and delays that process is fatal. It creates openings for the bureaucrats to squeeze life from the struggle.
Lenin wrote, “It is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution. Revolution arises only out of a situation in which objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”
When revolutionary leadership is lacking, the dead hand of the union leaders and the reformists can misdirect even the mightiest uprising. May 1968 saw a much bigger wave of revolt in France than today. Repression of student protesters triggered an immense movement of workers.
On 13 May, transcending the confined vision of the union leaders, an immense demonstration brought together school and university students, and workers from all over the country. One account describes the marchers embodying “the flesh and blood of modern capitalist society, an unending mass, a power that could sweep everything before it, if it but decided to do so”.
From that day, three weeks of a general strike began, mobilising 10 million workers throughout the country. It was the largest general strike in history up to that point. Factories didn’t just close, many strikers occupied them and turned them from places of production to sites of collective political organisation.
President Charles de Gaulle was unsure of whether the army and the police would follow his commands. But union leaders and MPs insisted the struggle was for wage rises, not a new sort of society. They lowered workers’ horizons to better pay, which the government and bosses granted only to launch bitter revenge when the struggle ebbed.
Revolution wasn’t impossible. It failed because of the poisonous leadership of the union bureaucrats and the reformist Communist Party. For revolutionaries, the challenge is to prevent a similar process today.
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