Pablo Vasco
On Sunday, October 16, the “against expensive life and climate inaction” march was held in Paris. It was called by NUPES, the reformist political coalition led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa. There were neither the 140,000 people that the organizers exaggerated nor the 29,000 that the police minimized: in reality, some 50,000 marched from Place de la Nation to Place de la Bastille, many of them organized and also many independently, with their own banners and demands.
Among the several thousand who marched in front of the leading banner were the self-employed and numerous yellow vests: “We continue to be organized in each place and the right wingers did not come to this march, but many of us could not miss it, because inflation affects us all,” one person explained to me. Mixed between the columns of the NUPES from the different regions, there were trade union groups, environmentalist, LGBT, pacifist and anti-racist organizations. Among others, the militant column of La Alternativa, a federation made up of twenty student groups from all over the country, stood out: “We are anti-capitalists,” a university student told me, “and we know that the parliamentary dispute is not enough to change the relationship of forces.”
The march on the 16th was an expression of the popular anger that is growing throughout France against inflation, low wages and the anti-pension reform that Macron intends to impose at all costs. The greatest exponent of this working class and popular cauldron is the salary strike of refinery workers: in the warehouses of the TotalEnergies multinational, they continue to strike despite government threats of sanctions. And tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th, there is a national strike and mobilization of railway workers and bus drivers, for salary increases and against sanctions, to which other unions and student groups are calling to join, all of which fuels a climate of general strike.
In addition, the Macron government, lacking a majority of its own in parliament, threatens to use the annual decree allowed by the authoritarian constitutional article 49.3 to approve its 2023 Budget. This increases discontent. Both the extreme right of Marine Le Pen (RN) and the NUPES announced parliamentary motions of censure if Macron uses this article. Faced with the political-institutional crisis, some analysts do not rule out Macron dissolving parliament and calling for new elections. What’s more: a few days ago, against Macron’s position, 20 deputies of his own parliamentary bloc voted in favor of an amendment to the finance law to put a partial and temporary tax on certain business dividends.
At the head of the march, having to account for the social cauldron, the NUPES deputies carried a banner: “Support for the striking workers.” Mélenchon and other deputies and leaders of the LFI, the PC, the PS, the Left Party and the Greens, all members of NUPES, marched behind this banner. So did Philippe Poutou, spokesman for the NPA, the anti-capitalist party whose majority leadership unfortunately tails the reformists. In a symmetrical sectarian mistake, Lutte Ouvrière did not even attend to take any alternative position.
But the key was not only the important march, but also Mélenchon’s speech from the central truck, because it shows his objective as leadership. He intends to channel social mobilization in the wrong political direction, of class collaboration, that is, functional to the capitalist system: “With what we are doing today we outline the construction of a new Popular Front, which will exercise power in this country when the time comes… Another life is possible, detached from the looting of profit. Another world is possible, freed from the plunder of capitalist productivism. The Popular Union can be transformed into a Popular Front. And we all want it.”
Well, in 1936-1938 the French Popular Front meant the co-government of an alliance between the two main workers’ parties (CP and SP) with a bourgeois party (Radical Party), whose president was the social democrat Léon Blum. Faced with the wave of strikes and factory occupations, the CP that led the CGT betrayed the workers in exchange for some concessions. But it rejected the expropriation demanded by the working class rank and file in struggle, which terrified the French imperialist bourgeoisie. Blum’s government ended up repressing the workers, it lost the support of the masses and then exploded, which facilitated the subsequent triumph of the right and the arrival of fascism.
From the ISL and its militants in France, we believe that the course that Mélenchon proposes today is a misleading political strategy that must be rejected outright, without denying the possibility of employing tactics of unity of action and demand towards NUPES for specific issues or against the right and the extreme right. The popular-frontist trap must be opposed by the regrouping of the revolutionary socialists in a strong pole of the militant extreme left, based on class independence, which fights for the defeat of capitalism and for a government of the workers.