P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
[I. Introduction]On June 14, 1968, the day following the French government ban of revolutionary organizations, Pierre Frank was seized by French police and held incommunicado for ten days. It is little accident that Frank was among the first victims of de Gaulle’s repressive measures. Secretary of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI), the French section of the Fourth International, and a prominent voice of revolutionary Marxism in the May-June uprising, Pierre Frank has a long career in French revolutionary politics. As a teenager in Paris, he was expelled from school because of his radical political views. A few years later, in 1923 or 1924 he joined the Communist Party. In 1929 he was one of a group of Communists who sent a representative to see Leon Trotsky when the Bolshevik leader was exiled to Prinkipo, Turkey. Under Trotsky’s guidance, he helped found the Left Opposition in France. By 1931 he was elected to the International Secretariat and in 1932 became one of Trotsky’s secretaries in Prinkipo. As the curtain rose on World War II, Pierre Frank was sentenced to ten years in prison by the Daladier regime because of his “defeatist” activities against the French imperialist army. Escaping to England, he was arrested in October 1940, charged with not registering as an “alien” and sentenced to six months at hard labor. Following this he was rearrested by the British authorities and kept under lock and key until the end of 1943. Only after the war was Frank able to return to France. The PCI was built in France during the war itself, in defiance of Nazi occupation. It has been active in French politics since the liberation. Its members were persecuted and arrested for supporting colonial rebels during France’s war with Vietnam and again in the war with Algeria. Pierre Frank completed the following article on June 10 – four days before his arrest. It covers the period of the May-June revolt prior to de Gaulle’s reelection and the institution of repressive acts against revolutionary organizations and their members. In order to facilitate its reading, the article is followed by a brief chronology of events and a glossary of the political, trade-union and other organizations mentioned. |
May 1968 will go down in history as the month the French socialist revolution began. Opening with the struggle of the students against police intrusions into the Latin Quarter and the university, this month saw the entire working class entering into struggle, and with it all strata of the working population (the new middle class, the intellectuals, the peasants, etc.). This happened with a unanimity never before known in the past.
All of the country’s youth were to be seen in this struggle: the high-school students, university students, the young workers – both employed and unemployed – including the “young hoods” that the bourgeois press, the government ministers, and so many others have slandered, though they are nothing more than the victims of “consumer society.” The youth took the lead of a struggle which unfolded in the streets including extremely violent clashes with the repressive forces of the bourgeois state. Strikes, factory occupations, occupations of all sorts of buildings, street demonstrations took place not only in Paris but throughout the entire country. No region was untouched by the gigantic hurricane which swept the country. The capitalist state foundered for several weeks. It recovered its bearings in extremis much less thanks to its own strength than to the default, worse, the betrayal of the leaderships which controlled the great majority of the country’s vital forces.
The French economy, which had already passed through great struggles like June 1936, had never been paralyzed as it was in May 1968. According to the statistics about 10 million workers were on strike but this does not give a complete picture of such a situation. Tens of thousands of workers (in gas, electricity, the waterworks, and newspaper printing, etc.) continued to work only to provide for the most elementary needs of the civil population. And they did so by decision of their unions.
The bosses and the government found themselves bereft of all authority over the industrial, commercial, and banking enterprises, the means of communication, and the great modern mass media. The armed forces were obviously insufficient to suppress the movement. The police department employees were on strike. The police themselves threatened to go on strike. It was hard to envisage use of the army, in view of the consequences it would have provoked. The repressive troops (CRS, the Gardes Mobiles, etc.) were tired out after several nights of fighting in the streets of Paris and incessant mobilizations throughout France.
In a situation where the government was disabled for a period of several weeks and the workers traditional political and trade-union leaderships were bypassed by events, the revolutionary center of the Sorbonne arose with extraordinary improvisation. The most diverse revolutionary currents, previously subjected to implacable repression by the bureaucratic apparatuses of the reformists, came together in close proximity. Day after day, for several weeks, out of the ferment of this socialist democracy, an orientation emerged from this center which made it possible to carry the movement beyond all possible expectations.
In the opinion of all observers, this movement went far beyond June 1936. The historic parallels cited went back to Petrograd 1917, to the revolutionary movements of 1918 and 1919, and the first weeks of the Spanish revolution of July-August 1936. No doubt was possible: We were experiencing the first great revolutionary thrust which would reach a peak in a few days and put the question of power on the order of the day. This took place in an economically developed capitalist country (the fifth-ranking in the world). All the problems of the society (economic, political, social, cultural, etc.) were posed on a knife’s edge. These problems are those of all highly industrialized capitalist countries. But they are also, in part, the problems of colonial countries (concerning relations of the working class with other social classes), and even of countries where capitalism has been abolished (concerning relations of the working class with the bureaucracy). With good reason, the entire world turned its eyes to France in May 1968.
The battle was still not over in the early days of June. The strike was still being vigorously pursued in the biggest plants, in vital sectors of the economy, in education, etc. But its peak had passed. The conquest of power was no longer on the order of the day. In the wake of this first phase of the socialist revolution a series of great economic struggles are continuing whose results will be very important for future revolutionary waves, determining their initial slogans and their objectives. There also remain a whole series of bases, large or small bastions, where the state, capitalist property and numerous institutions of capitalist society have been more or less completely put in question.
It is essential to draw a balance sheet of this month of May 1968 as soon as possible, to define what has been achieved, to clarify the perspectives which have opened up, to lay out the main lines of the tasks to come. This is the objective of this pamphlet. In the conditions under which I am writing it I make no claim that it is complete, or that it is exempt from certain inadequacies and perhaps even errors in detail. Nonetheless, I am sure that it will answer the main questions raised in the course of the events and will provide a sufficiently clear basis for the discussion which will inevitably begin in the workers movement and more particularly in the vanguard of the workers movement on the problems posed in May 1968 by the socialist revolution which has begun.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005