France at the Turning Point¶
Core Argument¶
France at the Turning Point
This chapter argues that revolutionary politics must tear away the bourgeois fictions of ‘nation’ and ‘democracy’, which serve only to mask the reality of class rule. The entire Third Republic, it contends, is nothing but the dictatorship of finance capital. An episode in Grenoble illustrates this starkly: five workers were ejected from a Comité des Forges hospital for reading L’Humanité, yet the Socialist mayor and a left newspaper refused to intervene after the paper lost a 20,000-franc advertisement. The armed gangs of Colonel de La Rocque are merely the pickets of finance capital; Daladier and the Radicals serve the same master, differing only in method. The crisis of capitalism—stagnation, agrarian crisis, unemployment—drives France toward either proletarian revolution or fascism. After the events of 6 February 1934, the Radicals capitulated to armed force, and the resulting regime assumed a Bonapartist character, posing as an ‘arbiter’ above classes.
The People’s Front is denounced as a cartel, not a genuine mass movement. Its function is to brake and demoralise the mass movement, channelling it into class collaboration. Sarraut provided the classic definition: a safety valve for the regime. In foreign policy, Blum, Cachin and their allies have renounced the proletarian viewpoint for national imperialism, hiding behind ‘collective security’ and the League of Nations. The People’s Front’s programme is a collection of generalities that leaves everything as it is. Its leaders disarm the proletariat politically and oppose its physical arming, preaching moral principles while ignoring Marx and Engels’s teachings on armed force. The Radicals use the Front to prove to big capital that the revolution is not a threat and that the parliamentary system can be saved. The Radical Party is not the party of the petty bourgeoisie but the democratic party of French imperialism. The crisis of capitalism disarms Radicalism, and fascism feeds on the petty bourgeoisie’s growing distrust of it. The political fate of France depends on whether fascism or the proletariat inherits Radicalism’s influence. The Marxist strategy of alliance between proletariat and petty bourgeoisie requires irreconcilable struggle against the latter’s traditional parliamentary representatives, not a conspiracy with them. The Bolsheviks only ever made episodic, practical agreements, never a permanent, programmatic bloc like the People’s Front. The policy of the People’s Front is a policy of betrayal. Stalin’s Kremlin, having renounced world revolution, now supports the status quo and this very Front, which aims to reassure the Radical bourgeoisie. The chapter condemns Communist participation in this bloc and in Freemasonry as outright class collaboration.