France: The electoral success of the New Popular Front is not a victory for proletarians

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France: The electoral success of the New Popular Front is not a victory for proletarians

More than the NPF's electoral success, the far right National Rally's unexpected failure to win a majority that would have enabled it to form a government, was a relief for many proletarians, particularly among immigrant workers who make up a large proportion of the industrial and non-industrial proletariat: the fight against immigration, which is the main theme of the NR's propaganda, and the xenophobic measures it envisaged, presaged an intensification of pressure and repression against this fraction of the proletariat, while at the same time encouraging racist vexations of all kinds and accentuating divisions between French and foreign proletarians.

But in fact, even before the NR came to power, successive governments have continued to multiply measures and pass anti-immigrant laws as part of their ongoing attacks on proletarians' living and working conditions. Against all these measures and all these attacks, the only effective path lies in proletarian struggle, not in voting and trusting the left-wing parties and trade union leaderships, who have demonstrated their devotion to the bourgeois order on countless occasions, both in government and in opposition.

The electoral alliance of these anti-proletarian parties and organizations has led, as was inevitable, to a “republican front” in the name of which it has called for support for bourgeois candidates including those directly responsible for anti-worker attacks: that's how, for example, the so-called “far left” of La France Insoumise got people to vote for former Prime Minister Borne, who spearheaded the attack on pensions, or for Darmanin, responsible among other things for the latest anti-immigrant law and colonial repression in New Caledonia, and who in February 2021 found NR leader Marine Le Pen “a bit soft” against “separatism” and “Islamism” (key words for Arab proletarians)!

Once again, the scarecrow of the far right was used to mobilize voters in favor of the supposedly threatened “Republic”, i.e., in favor of the “democratic” form of capitalist class domination, which the NR had absolutely no intention of modifying; this electoral mobilization is the concretization in the ballot box of the more general political submission of the proletariat to bourgeois domination, under the action in particular of the trade union and parties that sabotage all its struggles.

The electoral surge of the far-right in France and other European countries is the sign of a fundamental trend in the present conditions of growing economic and war crises towards greater authoritarianism in bourgeois domination, a trend that has been at work for several years under “republican” governments of both right and left. The failure of the NR to come to power, which can be explained by the fact that major bourgeois forces in France did not agreed today (according to the employers' daily Les Echos, “economic circles” (sic) were “tetanized” by the prospect of a NR government, contacts with Le Pen having “gone badly”), does not contradict this trend, which will continue in one form or another, whatever government emerges from the NPF's laborious internal negotiations and/or parliamentary combinations.

The Railway Workers' Federation (CGT) is calling for demonstrations on July 18 in front of prefectures and the National Assembly to demand the formation of an NPF government. These unions bonzes are not calling on proletarians to struggle to defend their class interests! And yet, at the time of the first Popular Front in May-June 1936, it was workers' strikes that wrested from the capitalists the fundamental demands not envisaged by the parties of the electoral coalition. Most of these (the 40-hour week, pensions, etc.) began to be abolished in 1937 by the Popular Front government itself, which also allowed inflation to take over the wage increases they had achieved, while steering the country towards preparation for imperialist butchery.

The lesson tragically paid for by the working class is that proletarians can only rely on their own strength, their own struggles and their independent class organization, and not on the reformist parties and organizations that claim to defend them without touching capitalism.

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