Break Union of the Left

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Three the Red a terror 'urban Baader, leading members of Army Faction (RAF), st unit of so-called guerrillas, Andreas Gudron Ensslin and Six weeks after the initial breakdown in talks between the partners in France's Union of the Left the situation seems as black as ever for the parties concerned.

The collapse of the reconvened talks on September 24, and the failure to date to revive them has been compounded recently .1.1 darnedies lary Dy announcements from both the Communist Party (CP) and the Socialist Party (SP) concerning next spring's legislative elections.

These divisions are clearl • the product of diplomatic manoeu vring within the Union in time for next spring's elections.

The bourgeois Radicals, with only 3% of the vote, have been waving the free enterprise ilab within the bloc in an attempt to 11. 1.1 win support from middle-class elements disenchanted with Giscard and Barre.

The CP have been putting on a militant face in order to hold on to their electoral support within the working class-a support which was threatening to. dwindle away because of the CP's open espousal of such right wing measures as the "all round nuclear strike force"

The SP meanwhile have been able to hedge their bets-and currently hold options on either a Union of the Left or a "centre-left". government, should they secure enough votes in March.

There are thus no issues of principle dividing these popularfrontist allies: each is concerned exclusively with playing to its own audience and presenting itself as the best defender of the Union's thoroughly capitalist common programme.

The CP have also to. contena, though, with the additional pressure of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose interests in France at the moment seem best served not by the Union of the Left in power but by the present right wing set up of Giscard and Barre.

There can be no doubt that the CP's apparent "intransigence" on a number of questions has damaged the prospects of a CP/SP/Radical unity, and therefore the prospects electoral victory next spring.

This would accord with the present state of Soviet diplomacy. and raises the question whether the CP have consciously disrupted the discussions knowing that this could cause electoral failure.

Leading Paris newspapers have been quick to spot Moscow's hand in every CP move, but have played this up for their own anti-communist ends.

ONE-SIDED The "Trotskyists" of the Organisation Communiste Internationale (OCI) have denounced the CP for the 'intolerable and scandalou! situation" arising from its "frenetic campaign of division" against the SP. But this denunciation is a one. sided one which lets the SP off the hook.

The OCI have raised the demands for immediate. SP-CP unity; "for a CP/SP majority in the legislative elections" in order to "put an end to the Giscard-Barre government and the 5th Republic" (Information Ouvrieres, 821, 19 October 1977).

Although the OCI has consis tently characterised the Union of the Left as a popular front, its unity call is now hard to distinguish from the Pabloite LCR group's similar demand.

Their paper, Rouge, has called for a "reaffirmation of workine class unity" (No 473, 12 October as the answer to the crisis-by which they mean the immediate coming together of the CP and SP.

NO SUPPORT The WSL is certainly in favow of working class unity, and we are quite prepared to give critica support to candidates of the CP anc SP in the March elections.

But such support is conditiona on one thing-namely that the CE and SP break not only with the bourgeois Radicals, but also witł the Union of the Left and it: common programme.

Until that condition is achievec can give no support to parties ir