French Unions' Day of Action

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The 'national day of action by the French trade unions on May 13th gave a clear indication as to where the 'new line' of the French Communist Party is leading in the short term.

Scarcely a single union leadership issued an official call for strike action, leaving the forms of protest against inflation and unemployment to be decided 'as appropriate by the middle-rank bureaucrats of the regional and sectional organisations.

STOPPAGES

Partial stoppages took place in the building and engineering industries, by postmen and miners, and in the electric supply and print sectors. But in Paris itself the main demonstration did i not exceed 20,000.

The first rumblings are also visible of an internal crisis within the Communist Party: Louis Althusser, one of the Party's leading theoretical lights, has denounced the official abandonment of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and has declared (in a preiace to a book on Stalin's court biologist Lysenko) that the general line of Stalinist repression and lying persists in the USSR.

Althusser, of course, presents this as a novel discovery, and his main objection is that it hampers the French Party in achieving a satisfactory relationship with the intelligentsia.

REPROACH Nonetheless the Party leadership has felt the pressure sufficient to issue an official reproach to him in their daily paper L 'Humanite.

At the same time the Party has suffered a serious setback in the first test of its line since the 22nd Congress - at the recent parliamentary by election near Tours.

Its share of the vote fell below all previous results in the area during the Fifth Republic. This brought an emergency meeting of the political committee - not in any way • to change the line, but to launch a campaign of 'explanation' by the local organisations of the new 'national' perspectives offered by the Communist Party's policy.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

This policy now includes explicit support for the French nuclear instrument of weapons force, national indepenas an essential dence'.

In the universities, strike action continues on many campuses against the government's educational reforms' - designed to tie policies on admissions, courses and examinations much more directly to the demands of the employers.

Despite the mass demonstrations during April, the government has scarcely retreated at all in policies, agreeing only to an extensión of 'consultations' Here again, Stalinists (and the social democrats) bear a direct responsibility for their refusal to allow any effective support from the workers' organisations for the students.

UNIVERSITIES

The struggle in the universities also demonstrated the real content of the 'democratic" policies of the Stalinists. Their sabotage has permitted the fascists to show their faces on a scale not seen since before the 1968 general strike and the student demonstrations which triggered it.

On one of the Paris campuses -Assas - courses go ahead under the "protection" of armed squads of extreme right-wingers from the law faculty, assisted by thugs exported from as far afield as Marseilles.

With the police turning a benign blind eye, they have already attacked and injured several dozen left-wing and Communist Party students on university premises and in the neighbouring Luxembourg Gardens.

The possibility of an open split dominated the recent conference of the Workers Union Confederation of Turkey (CTWU), country's biggest union confederation.

More than 300 delegates attended the April conference,. the outcome of which was crucial to the political balance in the class struggle in Turkey.

Until now the CTWU has shackled the struggles of organised workers by its policy of standing "above" political parties. This "non-political" pose has been the cover for direct and open support given by the CTWU leaders to the reactionary bourgeois parties.

CHANGE

But at the conference, 24 out of 35 federations within the giant CTWU demanded a change of policy, in opposition to the leadership, while only 11 defended the present "non-political" attitude.

Of course this does not mean all 24 opposition federations wanted an independent workers party. 19 of them wanted to support the "left" democratic party, the Republican Popular Party • (RPP) led by former Prime Minister Ecevit.

But the other five federations correctly argued that the existing parties are incapable of defending or solving the problems of the working class, and that a new party fighting for their interests should be built and supported.

In a play for such support to be given instead to the RPP, Ecevit (who throughout the conference was engaged in private discussions with German SDP General SecretWilly Brandt) made a demagogic speech offering a 'deal' with the bureaucratic CTWU leaders. He stressed that:

"The questions that should be asked of a political party by the CTWU are:

Will you allow workers to participate in state administration? If so, how?

Will you hand over the management in the state sector to workers or not?

Will you prepare progress plans