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Notes of the Month, International Socialism, No.57, April 1973, pp.2-3.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Richard Kirkwood writes: For the first time since the International Communist movement began its drift into reformism the recent elections offered French workers a revolutionary socialist alternative on a national scale. The results were surprisingly good. The 171 candidates of Lutte Ouvrière and the 93 of the Ligue Communiste obtained between them almost 300,000 votes, 200,000 of them for Lutte Ouvrière. This is more than Krivine got in the presidential election of 1969 although this time it only takes in two-thirds of the country. Lutte Ouvriere got an average of 2.3 per cent of the votes where they stood and the Ligue Communiste 1.8 per cent.
What is perhaps more significant is that Lutte Ouvrière obtained this percentage more or less evenly over the whole country including areas where there had never been an organised revolutionary socialist presence. This indicates that there is a current of working-class opinion in the country as a whole which is sympathetic to revolutionary socialist ideas and, above all which responded to Lutte Ouvrière’s call to show their mistrust of the leaders of the Left. The fact that Lutte Ouvrière based its campaign on a criticism of the inability of the Left Union to offer guarantees of even the most basic improvements in workers’ living standards and that it argued for a revolutionary vote as a practical way of warning both Left Union and Gaullists that workers were willing to fight for such improvements is probably one of the reasons why Lutte Ouvrière did better than the Ligue Communiste which concentrated on more abstract socialist propaganda. It is quite clear from the figures that although part of the revolutionary electorate was made up of people who had previously voted for the PSU, almost half of Lutte Ouvrière’s votes came from CP voters. During the campaign Lutte Ouvrière found that even workers who still thought it vital to vote for the CP were willing to give to the Lutte Ouvrière election fund and basically agreed with the critique of the Left Union.
Even more important than the final result was the fact that, largely for reasons of respectability, the CP abandoned its policy of vicious, often physical, attacks on revolutionaries. The opportunity thus was provided for a dialogue with workers in and around the CP in a situation where these workers were unhappy about the sordid compromises that had led to the Left Union. For the first time CP members actually came to Lutte Ouvrière meetings to argue with them. For the first time for 40 years revolutionary socialists began to be recognised as part, if only a tiny part, of the working-class movement. This effect was strengthened by the effect of a national campaign and by the size of the vote both of which serve to show workers that revolutionaries are not just a few local extremists but are part of a real movement. If this contact with a whole new layer of workers can be maintained then the revolutionary socialist movement in France stands to make considerable headway.
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