.::: FLTI :::.

France - July 13, 2024

Thousands and thousands of workers celebrate Le Pen's defeat in the legislative elections

Now we must retake the fight for 35 hours/week, retirement age and all the lost conquests

Le Pen is going to be defeated in the streets!

No pact with Macron, the executioner of the workers!

Down with the Fifth French imperialist Republic!

Let the Paris Commune return throughout France!

The European Union parliamentary elections held on June 9 unleashed a major crisis for Macron's government. Rassemblement National o RN (National Gathering) - a far-right party led by Marine Le Pen - obtained a large victory and the Party of Macron, the French president, was in third place. Therefore, he immediately called early legislative elections for the lower house of the parliament of the Fifth Republic. On June 30, the first round of the legislative elections was held, confirming the broad victory of RN, which reached 33% of the votes.

On July 7, the 2nd round was held, where the coalition of the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, alliance led by La France Insoumise of Melenchon, also made up of the SP, the Greens and the CP) together with Macron's party with their allies carried out a campaign to “do what is necessary so that the ultra-right does not win”. And in the districts where candidates from the RN, the NFP and the Macronists faced each other, one of the latter two withdrew their candidacy to give the votes to the other list, so between the two forces they dropped 200 candidates.

Thus, to the surprise of many, in the second round the NFP obtained 182 seats (31.5%) and Ensemble, Macron's alliance, obtained 168 seats (29.1%) and in third place with 143 seats there was RN (24.8%).

Now, Macron must name a prime minister from the majority force in parliament, even if it were an opposition party. The point is that none of the first 3 forces has an absolute majority in Parliament (289 seats). Therefore, Macron has not yet named the new prime minister and Gabriel Attal, current prime minister, will remain in his position.

The EU crisis and the imperialist offensive

A phenomenal crisis hovers over the states of imperialist Maastricht, with its banks bankrupt and the treasuries of the states depleted and plundered by finance capital. The reason is, United States, with Biden at the helm, provoking and sustaining the war in Ukraine with NATO, deprived Germany and France of cheap gas and oil from Russia. US imperialism thus has left the European Union weakened in the world economy, as it disorganized its market and even broke the Franco-German axis.

France not only lost market in Europe, but also in its African colonies where its troops have been expelled by the masses in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Inter-imperialist disputes over gas, oil and raw materials, as well as over spheres of influence, are then deepening.

In order to dispute the world market, each imperialist power must defeat its own working class and thus the French bourgeoisie, hand in hand with the SP and Macron, has been attacking the working class, taking away its conquests. SP’s Hollande already did it in 2016 with the modification of the labor code where the 35-hour work week, collective agreements, union rights, among other things, were eliminated. Macron's government, representative of large employers and financial capital, was the one who ended up imposing this labor flexibility, also attacked students and immigrants with the Darmanin law and made retirements more out of reach with the pension reform. In addition, he was forced to impose taxes on fuel (2018) and later cut state spending and remove subsidies for agricultural production (2023), this attacking his own social base, the rural middle class and the agrarian petit-bourgeoisie, which for decades supported the French imperialist governments that subsidized them. In the midst of an enormous agrarian crisis throughout Europe, the rural middle class, attacked by the Macron government, was seduced by Le Pen's anti-Maastricht program because it is which wrecks them economically, by its rules that impose very high production costs on them. For this reason, a sector of the masses sees the RN as an alternative way out of the crisis and this explains the 10 million votes it received, with which it obtained 50 more deputies than before, what is a historical record.

In the 2nd round of the legislative elections there was a 66.71% turnover, the highest figure since 1997. Without a doubt what was strengthened in these elections is the overall regime and its institutions, with a new legitimized parliament, although without absolute majorities, but split in 3 large blocks.

The campaign against Le Pen: a democratic front with the enemies of the workers

Faced with the danger of the establishment of a recalcitrant right-wing government, with an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic program that goes against all the rights of minorities and the most oppressed sectors, a sector of the masses today celebrate the victory of the NFP. Though, fascism is not defeated at the polls but in the streets!

Furthermore, with these election results Macron, who has attacked the working class brutally, has been strengthened. And also the Socialist Party, which was totally in crisis after Hollande's government, which stole historic conquests from the working class, and then exploded and had virtually disappeared. Hollande ran as an allied candidate to the NFP and was elected a deputy. This is also how Philippe Poutou of the NPA (an anti-capitalist party that did the entire campaign for the NFP) ran. That is to say that the NPA is in the same alliance as Hollande! On that front there is the same Stalinism that from the leadership of the union centrals betrayed the enormous struggles that the working class waged in the face of each attack by the bourgeoisie and prevented it from joining the struggle of the ruined sectors of the countryside.

And they make the working class, the immigrants, the most impoverished sectors believe that fascism can be stopped by forming “a democratic front” with the class enemies. This is the greatest deception and trap, this policy of “progressive” blocs, of supporting the lesser evil and submitting to the bourgeoisie. The policy of “everybody against Le Pen” means supporting the SP and Macron, who are the ones who destroyed the working class…. That is, those who strengthened Le Pen! And on the other hand, by the hands of those who tore our conquests from us, we will never be able to recover them.

The working class is faced with an iron alternative: either it returns to the path of the Paris Commune to recover the lost conquests or it will remain subdued to the pact with Macron and the social imperialists

For this reason, it is necessary to raise a worker program that provides a solution before the imperialist crisis, that attacks capitalist interests and property, that confronts French imperialism allied of Zionism and the plunderer and oppressor of the masses of its colonies. In this way we can win over the ruined middle classes of the countryside and the city and make them break with Le Pen's bourgeoisie.

To recover the 35 hours a week, decent retirements and all the conquests that Macron and the SP tore from us in these years, we must win the streets again, with a policy independent of the bourgeoisie, setting up organizations suitable for the struggle, defeating the Stalinist and reformist union bureaucracy of all stripes, because with these leaderships we cannot fight. Enough of bureaucratic and collaborationist leftist leaderships!

Nothing good will come from the hand of Macron or his pact with Melenchon for the workers, the exploited and the immigrants. No pact with Macron or the Socialist Party: they took away our historic conquests as the 35 hours/week and decent retirements, and imposed a brutal labor flexibility on us.

There is no time to waste, the organizations that claim to represent the interests of the working class have to break with the bourgeoisie and put themselves at the service of this fight:

The working class must once again take center stage! To do this, it is more than necessary to conquer organizations capable of fighting, true fighting committees by establishments, factories, schools, cities, regions, and coordinate them at the national level. Committees of workers, immigrants, retirees, combative students, small agricultural producers and also rank-and-file soldiers.

We must take the resolution of our problems into our firm hands! We must stop the bosses' offensive and recover our lost conquests! Let’s return to the path towards the revolutionary general strike, conquering the streets again with pickets, factory occupations, road blocks, barricade combats.

Transnational corporations pile up fortunes and take all the wealth out of the colonial world. Let the capitalists and bankers pay for the crisis! Down with the 30 families that own the large economic groups in France!

Expropriation of transnational companies, without compensation and under workers' control! Expropriation of banks under the control of their workers in order to give cheap loans to small farmers! Expropriation of the large groups that exploit the land and distribute and market food!

There is the money for us to achieve a salary increase at the level of the market basket, plus work, health, and decent housing for all workers. Papers and all the rights for immigrants who are the ones who do the worst jobs!

Let's make the cry that the workers and the impoverished sectors imposed in the strike against the pension reform a reality: Macron demision, Macron resign! Down with the regime of the Fifth Republic! We must put an end to this regime of the imperialist bosses and put in place the power of the exploited!

Down with imperialist Maastricht!

Enough of imperialist parasites that plunder oppressed peoples! Let us take the fight for the liberation of the colonies and semi-colonies into our hands.

Out with French bases and troops in Africa and all overseas territories! Since no people that oppresses another will be able to liberate themselves.

Therefore, as a French working class we have a duty to our class brothers and sisters who are being massacred in Palestine and Ukraine.

We must stop the genocide of the Palestinian people in which French imperialism is a complicit!

Out with the butcher Putin from Ukraine! Down with the traitor Zelensky who hands Ukraine over to NATO and the EU!

Out with imperialist Maastricht and NATO from the oppressed peoples!

Let us fight to establish the power of the exploited and oppressed:

For a successful Paris Commune throughout France! On the way to conquering the United Socialist States of Europe!

Editorial Board of the paper “The International Workers Organizer”

The betrayal by Stalinism at the head of the CGT and by other leaderships had removed the working class from the scenery

Faced with each attack by the French imperialist bourgeoisie, the working class put up a battle with its methods, as barricades, blockades, strikes, factory occupations, etc.

In each of the fights it was betrayed by their leaderships, the Stalinist and social democratic union bureaucracy that lead the main union centers. The fight against the reform of the labor code was led by the CGT and other labor confederations, such as Solidaires (NPA), a member of the Intersindical, to a pressure struggle and then they sat down to negotiate with the Hollande government.

When every Saturday the Yellow Vests won the streets of Paris, openly clashing with the police, those same union centers separated the working class from them, so preventing the workers from entering the battle when it was the order of the day to defeat the regime of the Fifth Republic.

In the fight against the pension reform, the union bureaucracies and the social-imperialist parties imposed staggered strikes, divided sector by sector, to wear them down, and ended up bringing the enormous forces deployed by the French working class and youth to the impotent policy of pressuring Parliament not to vote on said reform, which Macron finally managed to impose.

When the imperialist bourgeoisie attacked small rural producers and they rebelled against Macron, the working class had already been removed from the scene and was separated from this struggle. It could not intervene in this agrarian crisis with an independent strategy at the service of all oppressed classes.

Each battle of the French proletariat was separated from the combats of the immigrant workers and the working youth -sons and daughters of immigrants from the cités-, who faced the murderous police dozens of times with revolutionary outbreaks.

And Stalinism sustained this policy throughout Europe where it directs most of the trade union centers. Their passivity in the face of the demands of the ruined small producers and European agricultural workers meant support for their own imperialist governments. In the same way they left isolated the Ukrainian workers who are approaching defeat in their national liberation struggle with Putin occupying their territory, with USA looting their food, gas and minerals and the IMF drowning them. Thus they divided the ranks of the working class country by country.

The renegades of Trotskyism accompanied Stalinism in this policy. In 2015, when the “anti-terrorist front” led by Hollande was set up that justified the massacre in Syria and of which Le Pen was a part, the former Trotskyists had the same policy of denouncing and confronting ISIS as the greatest enemy.

Today, all together they call to mobilize “against Le Pen” in a campaign against the “right” and tie the fate of all the exploited to Mélenchon and all bourgeois left politicians. A true tragedy. We must break this policy before it is too late!

Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon in the legislative elections

Mass demonstrations against the attack on pensions (February 2023)

Assembly in the "Commune Square" against the reform of the labor code of the Hollande government (2016)

Barricades of the Yellow Vests against Macron's tax hikes (2018)