French Trotskyism
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
Although Trotskyism as an organized tendency has pretty much
disappeared,
A word or two of introduction might be in order. There are 3
significant Trotskyist currents in
Christophe Nick's "Les Trotskistes" is a 583 page mess, from all appearances.
It is filled with factual errors and misspellings. Max Shachtman
comes out Max Chatman, which evokes for Birchall
"the horrifying thought of a Shachtmanite chatroom." Nick sounds basically like a David Horowitz
clone, writing that "The Trotskyists are said to
have placed their men in all the positions of power that seem to them to be of
strategic importance." Such an observation, and something that has a lot
to do with the marketability of the books under review, would be borne out by
the fact that Lionel Jospin was "exposed"
as a member of the Lambertiste group while many of
the editorial staff at Le Monde were members of the LCR in their youth.
Birchall describes Nick's witch-hunting
proclivities as follows:
"We are frequently reminded that we are never more than
five metres from a rat. Apparently, the Trotskyists are nearly as close. (Rats are also reputed to
be able to swim up sewers and bite our buttocks when we are sitting on the
toilet; whether any Trotskyist group has yet perfected this technique is
unclear.)"
Frederic Charpier's "Histoire
de l'extrême gauche trotskiste"
is another redbaiting exercise with even more bizarre
interpretations. Trotsky is depicted as doing "entryism"
in the Bolshevik party, etc.
Despite having been a member of Lambert's group for 5 years,
Philippe Campinchi's "Les lambertistes"
is cut from the same cloth as Nick and Charpier's
books, while openly trying to cash in on the lurid "exposés" noted
above: Birchall's review copy had a bright red band
around the cover marked 'The former party of Lionel Jospin.'
Nearly everything that the Lambertistes are up to is
regarded as sinister, including the posting of a security guard in front of
their headquarters. Birchall notes that perhaps they
do not want "simple citizens inflamed with curiosity by Campinchi's books trampling through their offices."
"Le veritable histoire de Lutte
Ouvrière" is a series of interviews with LO
leader Robert Barcia (alias Hardy). Barcia is an old-timer apparently, having spent time in
prison during the German occupation. Although Birchall
finds Barcia's recollections of such events
interesting, he is less taken with what he perceives as a tendency to cling to
Trotskyist dogma. In particular, he takes umbrage at Barcia's
badmouthing of the Socialisme ou
Barbarie group (Soub) that
was led by Cornelius Castoriadis and that included
Jean-Francois Lyotard in its ranks at one time. Soub's sin, it seems, was clinging to the belief that the
It is not surprising that all of these Trotskyist groups
suffer in comparison to Birchall's:
"Over thirty years ago, I attended part of an LO
editorial board meeting, and I still recall Hardy haranguing members of his own
leadership about how they did not appreciate what a hard time the working class
had of it.
"Hence the description of LO members as 'soldier-monks'
is not wholly unfair. For the revolutionary organisation
is a necessarily small group of hyperactive militants. Necessarily small,
because only in a revolutionary situation will the vast majority of workers
abandon their everyday pursuits in favour of
politics. The revolutionary organisation is not part
of the class - 'the companion in struggle' as Tony Cliff argued that genuine
Marxists should be - but is composed of outsiders, who support workers'
struggles, aim to educate the class, but remain separate from it. (A similar
view prevailed in the Lambertist organisation,
summed up by Benjamin Stora as 'the mysterious world
... of the party, separated from the rest of society, but able to enlighten and
organise it' [p. 65]. If this view of the party can
claim support from the Lenin of 1902, it gets none at all from the Lenin of
1905 or 1917.)
"This explains LO's notorious
position of discouraging its members from having children. As Hardy puts it:
"'It is scarcely possible to
rear children properly and give them the affection and attention they require
while at the same time leading the life of a militant at a certain level of
activity.'"
I must add the American SWP, which long ago disassociated
itself completely from the task of constructing a Fourth International, had
informal anti-children policies even more draconian than LO's: one woman was expelled for breast-feeding at a
branch meeting and another was encouraged to get an abortion so that she would
be free to do political work.
"Itinéraires" is a
series of dialogues between Pierre Lambert and Daniel Gluckstein,
his heir apparent. We learn from Birchall that the
two are contemptuous of NGO's, antiglobalization
groups like ATTAC and the campaign for the Tobin tax but he criticizes them for
refusing to engage with the people involved in such efforts. (Although I have
respect for the British SWP's antiwar work, I was far
less impressed with their tendency--and that of the LCR--to tail "antiglobalization" campaigns, especially the ill-fated
ultraleftism of the Black Bloc et al.)
There are also two books on the Trotskyist movement from the
LCR and the Lambertistes respectively: "Les trotskysmes" by Daniel Bensaïd
and "Le trotskysme et les trotskystes"
by Jean-Jacques Marie. Bensaïd's use of the plural is
mildly provocative, according to Birchall. I myself
find it in keeping with his generally donnish approach to politics, which is in
full display in his response to John Holloway, also contained in the current
HM. I remember reading translation of Bensaïd's
articles in the debates within the Fourth International in the 1970s and always
wondered why he couldn't express himself in a straightforward manner.
In Birchall's view, Bensaïd comes across less dogmatic--no doubt a function of
devoting four pages to a "generally fair summary" of Tony Cliff's
theory of state capitalism and insisting that it remains within the
"parameters of Trotskyism". In light of this, it should not come as a
big surprise that the LCR and the British SWP have conducted some tentative regroupment type discussions. And not surprisingly, they
have led nowhere.
Michael Lequenne's "Le Trotskysme sans fard"
(Unvarnished Trotskyism) focuses on the 1944 to 1960 period. Birchall regards his account of the 1952 split to be the
most important part of the book even though Pablo's famous "entryist" tactic into the French Communist Party was
far less momentous than actually projected. After winning a battle to implement
the line, only seven comrades were available to carry out the assignment. Birchall describes this as a "massive gap between
grandiose perspectives and real capabilities", which in some ways can be
described as the epitaph of the Trotskyist movement.
Benjamin Stora's "La derniére generation d'octobre"
is a memoir of his life in the Lambertiste movement.
Comrades might recall his name from a query posted to the list last year about
histories of
"Militancy remains a period of my life which I do not
repudiate. I retain a nostalgia for these youthful
commitments, as though they were a 'paradise lost'…. Today I see my commitment
as a mixture of idealism and blindness, of romanticism and a disturbing desire
for purity, intelligence and dogmatism."
Bensaïd has his own memoir, titled
"Une lente
impatience" (A Slow Impatience). It reveals living under the shadow of the
Holocaust. (I was somewhat surprised to discover that he was Jewish since he
was always understood by American Trotskyists as North
African and presumably Moslem.)
As a clue to understanding the flirtation (but no
consummation!) between the LCR and the British SWP, here's Birchall's
account of a possible area of agreement:
"But Bensaïd is less helpful
in disentangling the main lines of revolutionary strategy in the thirty-six
years since 1968. Without raking over the debate about the class nature of
Senile megalomania?
Like this?
"This insensitive world that spends one trillion
dollars each year on the military –it’s already two trillion-- this insensitive
world that extracts various trillions of dollars a year from the impoverished
masses, from the immense majority of this planet’s inhabitants, remains
indifferent when it is told that around 100,000 people have died, among them
maybe 25,000 or 30,000 children, or that there are 100,000 injured, and the
large majority is suffering from bone fractures in their arms and legs of which
barely 10% have been operated on, that there are children with mutilated limbs,
and young people, women and men, old people.
"This is the kind of world we are living in. It is not
a world full of goodness, but a world full of egoism. It is not a world of
justice, but one full of exploitation, abuse and pillage, where millions of
children die every year –and they could be saved--, just because they are
lacking a few cents worth of medicine, or some vitamins or re-hydration salts
and a few dollars worth of food, enough for them to live. They die every year
due to injustice, almost as many as died in that colossal war that I mentioned
a few minutes ago.
"What kind of world is this? What kind of world is this
where a barbaric empire proclaims its right to launch pre-emptive attacks on 70
or more countries, and is capable of bringing death to any corner of the globe,
using the most sophisticated weapons and killing techniques? It’s a world where
brutality and force prevail, with hundreds of military bases on the entire
planet. There is one of these on our soil, where they arbitrarily intervened
after the Spanish colonial power could no longer stand by itself, and when
hundreds of thousands of our country’s dearest sons --in a population of hardly
a million-- had perished in a long war lasting almost 30 years. And they left
us with the revolting Platt Amendment, attached to an equally repugnant
resolution that treacherously gave them the right to intervene in our country
whenever they considered there to be a lack of order."
You know something, I am far more interested in hooking up with governments, parties and individuals who are inspired by the fact that a head of state utters such words than I am with people like Birchall and Bensaïd who regard them as "outbursts of senile megalomania".
Shame on them.