Down With Macron, For a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government!

In the past months of 2023 huge strikes and demonstrations by millions of workers, students, and retirees have paralyzed France. This has been in response to the Macron government’s attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years and so cut the budget for pension benefits. But the so-called pension reform is only one of many grievances, the last straw in a series of attacks by the capitalist class on the French workers’ rights and standard of living. France is not alone. Next door, Germany has also seen militant strikes not witnessed for decades as has Britain across the channel. Other European countries are likely to follow. And all the while the Ukraine war looms on the near horizon. Where are France and Europe going and what is to be done?

Instead of leading the pension protests, the pro-capitalist misleaders of the French labor unions have only tail-ended them. As could be expected, while paying lip service to the struggle they have done all they can to control and hold back the workers, showing the capitalist rulers how “responsible” they are.

In 1938, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, wrote as the opening to The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program):

“The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.”

Today in France, across Europe, and around the world, those words ring just as true as they did 85 years ago. The historical crisis drags on. But in 2023 the grip of the “reformist” misleaders of the working class is not as strong as it once was. Be they Stalinist, Social Democrat, or just reformist, the class-collaborationist trade union bureaucrats and careerists are looked on by the rank-and-file with the sort of suspicion and distrust reserved for used car salesmen and real estate agents. And while across Europe and elsewhere fascism is again raising its head, the crushing of the workers—the necessary precondition for a fascist takeover—has nowhere occurred—yet! But the vanguard of the workers—the Bolsheviks—must get busy, must make hay while the sun still shines!

Without the intervention of a class-conscious vanguard, the revolts against pension takeaways, falling standards of living and quality of life, inflation, unemployment, deteriorating health care and housing—all the struggles in France and elsewhere—are doomed to end in defeat. That vanguard—the Bolsheviks—must reach out to the workers at their present level of consciousness with demands and slogans that can take them forward. Forward to a higher understanding of the reality behind their current situation and the need to do away with capitalist rule once and for all. 

Down with Macron, yes, but not to make way for a new shuffle of bourgeois politicians. The demand must be Down with Macron, For a Workers and Farmers Government! The slogan of a workers’ and farmers’ government will make sense to the radicalizing workers, the young workers. Further, it raises the issue of which class shall rule while at the same time exposing the reformists’ support of this or that “leftist” bourgeois politician. Counterposed to such an approach would be the reformist or ultraleft calls for socialism or a “socialist” or even “communist” government. But the political landscape is rife with all sorts of definitions of those terms, terms which at any rate have been largely discredited among the workers by the betrayals of Stalinism and capitalist “welfare state” reformism. Workers in motion will want action and results, not debate over ideological terminology. A workers’ and farmers’ government, on the other hand, simply by acting in accordance with its name will be setting the foundation stones for genuine socialism from its first day in power.

At the same time, the vanguard—the Bolsheviks—should raise other demands, even partial demands, that can meet the workers halfway. For example, to demand that the class collaborationist union misleadership call for, organize and lead, a general strike to roll back the “reforms” to the pension system. The vanguard should also call for democratic strike and mass mobilization committees drawn from the rank-and-file. Yes, we must fight to stop the take-aways, and for improvements to living and working conditions under capitalism. But we must always do it in a way that raises the workers’ level of consciousness, that exposes the capitalist system for what it is and cuts the ground from under the misleaders who want to temporize with it.

It is imperative also to put the struggle in the context of the international situation. On the pretext of the Ukraine war, Europe is being duped and coerced into backing the efforts of US imperialism to extend NATO to Russia’s doorstep even as it tightens its hold over the European Union. US imperialism is demanding European rearmament, which means European sacrifice, that is to say, the workers’ sacrifice, as it pushes toward a Third World War. Under the guise of NATO, Europe is being reduced to vassalage by the United States in its quest for world hegemony.

Bolsheviks must therefore raise the demands (applicable to all European countries), France Out of NATO! and Not One Euro for Imperialist War! These and similar demands will explain to the workers the connection between the push to expand NATO, the war in Ukraine, and the economic crisis and attacks on their standard of living. The workers can be made to see how, through inflation linked in large measure to the US sanctions against Russia, they are being forced to pay higher prices for everything from bread to heating fuel even as they pay for the billions in Euros and military equipment being sent to stoke the war in Ukraine.

In the United States (the would-be world ruler), meanwhile, the US capitalist class and it’s gaggle of sewer politicians reel from one crisis to another: the criminally botched Covid response, the political gridlock in the face of the pandemic, the inability or lack of interest to stop the mass shootings or control gun violence in general, the inhumane—perhaps we should say genocidal—response to the flood of immigrants from the capitalist backwaters of Latin America and the world. In short, the system is breaking down. No one knows for sure if their children are safe today, not to mention what’s in store for them tomorrow. Tens of millions can no longer count on decent housing or affordable health care, or even nutritious food without running up more debt on their credit cards. But even here the workers are beginning to stir, showing signs that, like Rip Van Winkle, they are finally awakening from their long slumber.

The Bolsheviks and only the Bolsheviks, by winning the leadership of the working class and its allies, can save humanity and the world. As they chanted in Prague in 1968, Lenin, wake up!