Lutte Ouvriere Fête, May, 2004
Ted Crawford
The Saturday was hot and most pleasant
but on the Sunday morning the rain poured down and clearly a lot of
people were put off coming though in the afternoon is was as crowded as
usual.. We were running two stalls and we only had three comrades to do
so and I was the only one with any French so I was unable to get around
as much as I would have liked and chat to people. But a pleasant time
was had and we hung at the back of the Revolutionary History stall the
old RCP banner that we found among Al Richardson's files.
Attendance of the political groups was
worse than previous years. The non-LO stands are increasingly becoming
those of publications like ourselves or single issue campaigns. The only
stalls of English speaking groups this year were the AWL, the IBTs (the
Sparts with charm and good manners) and the LO US affiliate
Spark.
Of course a whole number of small left wing groups, including the
British SWP affiliate, have entered the LCR and thus have no independent
stand but I would have thought that since they do not have a stall where
they can sell their material their English comrades should sell such
French stuff as well as their English publications and therefore should
attend.
Apart from the failure of other
tendencies to appear, I would make two broad comments about the Fete.
Looking at the long term and thinking back over the past 15 years, it
seems to me that there is definitely less of a North African presence
than before. I doubt if LO would, or indeed could, keep statistics on
this but that is my subjective impression. Now I do not think that this
is LO's fault and I certainly do not think that this is the result of
their hard line against the hijab etc but rather it arises from deep
changes within French society and the increasing estrangement of many
who originate from Islamic lands. If you are close to, and part of
working class society as I believe LO is, then changes within the
working class will affect you, it cannot be avoided. Secondly I cannot
help still being struck as to what a happy place it is for children. I
do not say that you will never see a crying child but you seldom do and
working class families enjoy themselves immensely.
Now politics. Although there was a
certain amount of propaganda about the Iraq war it is I think, a
slightly less immediate issue in France than here since French troops
are not involved though a big demonstration was being called for the
visit of Bush to Paris on Saturday 5th June. But I had some
interesting conversations. I was told that within the LCR there were
innumerable fractions and it seemed unable to take a line on almost
anything. Allegedly the whole South East of France LCR was paralysed
because a young Muslim girl who wanted to join them (they should be so
lucky) insisted on wearing the hijab. So busy were they being for or
against (the criteria for membership is now decided regionally rather
than centrally) that nothing was being done. It was said that the group
affiliated to the British SWP who had entered seemed to have done so
without any clear idea at all of what they intended to do within the LCR.
(The rules of the LCR state that, if you have a fraction, you can call
meetings but they have to be open to other LCRers so the other state
capitalists naturally attend such meetings.)
Speaking with an old mate from 1968, I
asked how his activity in the Post Office Union was going. "But I'm
retired" he said, at 61. They were getting rid of anybody a bit older
and just as in 1871 General Gallifet picked out any Communard with grey
hair to be shot, (since he must have been a veteran of 1848) so the
bosses were trying to get rid of anybody who had experienced 1968. It
was less violent but.... He thought that France copied all Britain's
dreadful polices that affected the working class with a delay of about 5
years. "We are just five years behind you". The working class was
passive, beaten down and did not expect anything better though they were
quite aware that they were being screwed by the wealthy.
I also spoke with the faction within LO
"Convergences Revolutionnaires" who produce a paper. I had said in the
past that I could not see where they were different from LO. This year I
asked them about this. They have two points of disagreement.
1) They say that whatever type of state
the Soviet Union was Russia is now a plain vanilla capitalist state. LO
still thinks it is a bureaucratic and by implication workers state. I
told them I had just been in St Petersburg and yes, it was a capitalist
state (even if bureaucratic and deformed too), they were correct but
this was no basis for a split or anything. We both agreed here.
2) They thought that LO should open out
to the other groups. So I asked them how. I may have misunderstood about
it when speaking to them I could not see how they had any concrete
difference on this with the LO leadership. They did not seem to be
entrists or anything like that.
More broadly still there is the problem
of what to do, both in France and the other developed counties, as the
structure of the working class and thus its consciousness changes. LO's
position is to do the same thing as always even though of course their
activity is concentrated in a smaller and smaller pool as the working
class in its old form with its old consciousness becomes smaller while
the LCR's is to recognise the change and to jump uncritically on board
with any mildly progressive movement even it is totally oriented to
other social layers. And how do you deal with the Islamicists? They are
a symptom not a cause since they reflect the lack of class consciousness
not merely in their own ranks but in those of the other parts of the
French working class around them. Somehow you have to "Hate the Sin but
Love the Sinner" if the Christianity of that approach can be forgiven!
All of this would tax the brain of a Trotsky and modesty compels me to
admit I am not quite up to his standard - not quite.
But that is too pessimistic.
Revolutionary History had a warm welcome from those who know us. The MIA
was also welcomed and it was when someone said in excited tones how they
had got an email from someone they knew in Francophone West Africa who
was overjoyed at getting access to all this Marxist literature on the
web that I felt we were, in however tiny a way, making a difference
June 2004
