On the Russian argument not long ago David argued the French groups
all argued Russia was capitalist.
The biggest group in the world still does not.
For the record...
Who Are Lutte Ouvriere?
Submitted on 20 March, 2007 - 14:58
* France
* Party and class
* The Left
* Workers' Liberty 21, May 1995
France
Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller=92s organisation, is probably in real
terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world,
thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace
bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to
Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all
the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world.
However, they tend to reduce politics to bread-and-butter industrial
militancy plus socialist propaganda. They have little interest in, for
example, specific mobilisation against France=92s large fascist
movement, Jean-Marie Le Pen=92s National Front. Since the early 1980s
they have refused any sort of critical sup****t to the big parties
based on the working class, the CP and SP, against the right wing,
instead denouncing the official =93left=94 as no different from the right.
LO=92s sectarian limits are, paradoxically, very closely linked with its
strengths, both coming from a political culture which is, thanks to a
curious history, quite different from any other modern Trotskyist
group. In that culture, all decisive political questions are
translated into moral questions, and also into questions of social
class.
In debate on the Stalinist states, for example =97 where they had the
curious view that the old USSR was a =93degenerated workers=92 state=94,
while China, Eastern Europe, etc. were all =93bourgeois=94, despite (so
they freely admitted) a similar social and economic structure =97 their
backstop argument would always be: =93It=92s a moral choice=94. To
describe
the USSR as a degenerated workers=92 state was a choice for loyalty to
the 1917 workers=92 revolution; to describe China, Eastern Europe, etc.
as bourgeois was a choice for loyalty to the workers oppressed by the
Stalinist takeovers there. Other views were morally weak and =97 what
was, in this framework, saying the same thing in different words =97
petty-bourgeois.
This is a terribly limited and limiting culture =97 ultimately, I think,
crippling. Nevertheless, the possible one and a half million votes on
23 April will not be for LO=92s sectarian limits, but for the general
working-class revolutionary ideas which its campaign has managed to
popularise. They will signal a revival of working-class radicalism
which can be the basis for a revival of the French revolutionary left.
=BB
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