Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 46, 15 November 1948, p. 2.
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Our Paris correspondent writes that the striking miners scored a number of successes in the first days of conflict with French government troops. In one instance, 100 gendarmes and their Colonel were taken prisoner by. the miners. In other cases they were forced to retreat from the mines, abandoning jeeps, trucks, helmets, rifles, tear gas grenades, and so on.
The militancy of the mine workers is one more demonstration of the admirable fighting qualities of the French working class. It follows similar demonstrations by the rubber workers, the metal workers and the railway workers. Most impressive is the ability of the workers to recover from defeats such as the collapse of the general strike of November–December 1947.
Victory could surely be won by the miners if they had the right kind of leadership. But the Stalinists plunged the coal miners into this bitter struggle without a clear-cut political objective to inspire the strikers and the rest of the working class.
The Stalinists want to win posts in the capitalist government, utilizing the unions under their control as pawns in this treacherous game. But the basic problems faced by the workers such as the rising cost of living, the lack of consumer goods, the slowness of reconstruction, the danger of another war and the menace of a fascist victory in France can be solved only by putting a Workers and Farmers Government in power.
Only a decisive drive to oust the capitalists from power can unify, the French workers, inspire the middle class with hope and lead France out of the morass.
The failure of the Stalinists to guide the struggle into this channel is paving the way for de Gaulle, the would-be fascist dictator of France.
The French Trotskyists have condemned the shooting of strikers and the government’s brazen infringement of civil liberties in arresting foreign-born workers who joined the strike. The French Trotskyists likewise condemned the Stalinist tactic of “whirling strikes” because it dissipates the energy of the workers.
The Executive Committee of the Fourth International has issued an appeal to workers of the entire world to help the French working class in its struggle against the danger of a de Gaullist dictatorship.
General de Gaulle seeks power, says the appeal, in order to restore a regime similar to that of Marshall Petain under the Nazis, Sueh a regime means “proscription of the trade unions and the working class parties, abolition of democratic rights and liberties, of violence and terror against the working class, and war against the colonial peoples with redoubled vigor.”
The source of the fascist danger in France lies in the inability of decayed capitalism to grant concessions and reforms to the toiling masses. The capitalist ruling class is so weak that democracy has become an “impermissible luxury” and the capitalists must resort increasingly to brutal and naked repression to maintain their rule.
The appeal points put that de Gaullism finds “considerable support among American imperialist circles.” In their preparations for a Third. World War, the American capitalists count on the establishment of a “strong state” in France to “tame the workers.”
The appeal calls on the French workers to break from Stalinist leadership, and “together with the militants of the International Communist Party (Trotskyist), French section of the Fourth International, show the workers of the whole world the path of the proletarian revolution and of the construction of socialism.”
In addition the manifesto calls on the workers everywhere to pay close attention to the situation in France, to do everything possible to give material and moral aid to their French brothers in struggle, and to call for a “total struggle against the danger of a de Gaullist dictatorship, a struggle that you will support by all .the means at your disposal.”
The “new democracy” in the countries dominated by Moscow is being molded in strict conformity with the pattern forced on the Soviet Union by the Stalinist oligarchy.
For “agitation against the peoples democratic system;” that is, exercising the right of free speech, punishment in a concentration camp varies from three months to three years.
Anyone disseminating news which the Stalinist authorities decide might foment any kind of unrest, is subject to similar brutal penalties. If the news is false, then sentence ranges from 16 days to one year. If the news happens to be true, the sentence is made more lenient, ranging from eight days to six months.
An “insult” to an allied country or its representatives is likewise frowned on by the Stalinist-dominated regime, the corrective measures applicable to those expressing their opinion being sentences ranging from three months to three years.
Any of these crimes may invite even more savage sentences since an over-all “treason” law covers all activities which, according to one spokesman of the Czechoslovakian regime “might tend to disrupt the peoples’ democratic structure of the state.” Under this law people exercising their right to free speech, free assembly, or any other of the traditional democratic rights “will be punished in the same manner as sabotage in war time” such acts being “regarded as acts of treason.”
It is not even necessary to commit an overt act to set in motion the corrective provisions of these “democratic” laws. Failure to report “anti-government activity” is a most serious offense. In one locality, school teachers were sentenced to nine years imprisonment for violating this totalitarian law. Their “crime” against the Stalinist-dominated government was failure to report the “anti-governmental activities” of boys under their care.
The young students who engaged in these activities were of course given a much more severe sentence in accordance with the enormity of their crime. The maximum sentence handed out to them by the Stalinist dispensers of justice was 18 years in prison.
Last updated on: 30 March 2023