This article by philosopher Georges Gastaud and historian Annie Lacroix-Riz was published by the PRCF in France and is reproduced with thanks.
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Far be it from us, as lifelong antifascist, anti-negationist and antiracist activists, to have any thought of minimising the danger represented for democracy, immigrant workers and the labour movement, and even for the honour of France, by the possible arrival at the Hôtel Matignon of a Jordan Bardella, flanked by the unbridled ultra-reactionaries Eric Ciotti and Marion Maréchal.
Should a new ‘popular front’ be built against them, inspired by the great workers’ and republican uprising which, on 14 July 1935, saw the PCF-SFIC (the Communist Party of France and the French section of the Communist International), the PS-SFIO (the Socialist party and the French section of the Workers’ International), the Radicals (under the CGT and the CGTU union formations), under the combined folds of red and tricolour flags, jointly make the pledge of an antifascist popular front, for which moreover, the seventh congress of the Communist International had called via the voice of Georgi Dimitrov?
In principle, the answer to this question can only be a thousand times yes … provided, of course, that it is indeed an alliance worthy of its great historical precedent of 1936, and not an umpteenth recycling of the union of Atlanticist, liberal-compatible Euro-lefts, whose repeated betrayals, added to the Euro-austerity policies of Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, Manuel Valls and Emmanuel Macron, are precisely what has given rise to the ‘navy blue’ tide of the far-right among the working class.
However, and we say this with a great spirit of responsibility towards our people, this does not seem to be the path that the political coalition succeeding from the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES, a left-wing electoral alliance) intends to follow under the aegis of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Olivier Faure, Marie Tondelier, Fabien Roussel and the highly dangerous and warmongering Euro-Atlanticist agitator Raphaël Glucksmann.
Popular Front 1936: a popular mobilisation against fascism and war
On the one hand, indeed, the antifascist Popular Front of 1936 did not content itself with fighting verbally against the threat of fascism: it was based upon the proletariat in movement, and moreover on the factory occupations of the spring of 1936 – all things that the current Socialist party (stalwart admirers of the Eurocrat Jacques Delors, the super strike-breaker Laurent Berger, etc) and the neoconservative Glucksmann clearly abhor.
Indeed, the Popular Front of 1936, given powerful impetus by the Leninist and revolutionary Communist Party of France of the time, resolutely assumed, against the Europe of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini on the march, and also against its fifth column in France, a patriotic dimension that was to resolutely flourish in the HFrench Front proposed by Thorez in 1938, and subsequently in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTPF) and Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – Main-d’œuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) resistance, and finally in the construction of the National Council of the Resistance (CNR), putting “the world of labour at the heart of national life” again.
Even though Blum’s SFIO and Daladier’s Radicals were very quick to betray the unequivocally antifascist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist dimensions of the Popular Front (the “social pause” prepared in secret by Blum and his close collaborators in the company of the big bosses, the Matignon agreements having barely been signed (June 1936), non-intervention in Spain quietly cooked up with London and Berlin (July-August 1936), the Munich agreement (30 September 1938) giving the Hitlerite Reich a free hand in Czechoslovakia and the whole of eastern Europe), the historical Popular Front was inconceivable without a very active dialectic, entirely directed against big capital (the ‘200 families’ in command of the Bank of France), anti-imperialism and antifascism as offensively symbolised by the unity in struggle of the Marseillaise and the Internationale (see the great Jean Renoir film La vie est à nous ! [Life Belongs to Us!]).
Euro-Atlanticists trying to dress themselves up as popular democrats
Yet it would be an understatement to say that the construction of the current ‘popular front’ chooses to overlook this victorious dialectic, which is furiously rejected, on the right of this alliance, by the warmongering Glucksmann, the pro-Nato Greens and the Euro-Atlanticist Socialist party, and on its left, by the NPA (New Anticapitalist party) which, in the fusty Trotskyite tradition to which it remains wedded, still confounds – in the same narrowminded rejection – the French oligarchy with the working nation that is mistreated on a daily basis by Macron and his ruling circle, and led astray by Bardella and Co with the crassest xenophobia.
It could certainly be said that, in view of the Lepenist danger, one should not ‘be difficult’, and that anything and anyone has to be accepted in order to block the way for Bardella. Certainly, we hear this and we can understand it. But the problem is that there is more than one mortal danger hanging over our people. At the time of writing, Macron is preparing to send French troops disguised as ‘instructors’ to the explosive theatre of Ukraine, delivered to a power that is most officially nostalgic for the antisemite genocidal Stepan Bandera, Hitler’s henchman in Ukraine.
One would have to be utterly blind not to see that, if the French armies, and then after them, the English, Polish, German and finally American armies, engage in a military confrontation with Russia (and tomorrow the People’s Republic of China, since that is the principal point in Donald Trump’s programme), it will mean a world war with the utmost risk of annihilation of the French population, and even of humanity itself, if not life as a whole, given the number of nuclear warheads that will end up being deployed on all sides as soon as one of the belligerents loses its footing in the initially ‘conventional’ war.
How can forces claiming to represent life and humanism disregard this vast risk, which it would be madness to take, and under the guise of avoiding trivialisation of the risk represented by Bardella (which is certainly most necessary), completely bury their heads in the sand with regard to the military confrontation “without any red lines” openly called for by Macron … and applauded by his ‘left’ flank guards, the Raphaël Glucksmanns and other German and French ‘Greens’?
In short, how does the highly legitimate refusal to trivialise Bardella give the leaders of the parliamentary left, dubbed by Philippe Poutou – each a more legitimate successor of Jaurès than the next in words – the right to trivialise the worst Atlanticist warmongers, provided they declare themselves to be ‘left wing’?
Moreover, we are on the eve of the ‘European federal leap’ which will officially bring an end to the existence of an independent France (the end of the principle of unanimity in decision making would mark the changeover to a federal Europe and an integrated European state), and therefore its capacity to decide, by and for itself, on a new socialist-oriented policy.
And far from fighting against this prospect, or even informing the French, who know nothing about it, the Greens and the ‘socialists’ are for the federal state and for the Euro-Atlanticist army, since they voted for it in the European parliament and the French national assembly last November. As for La France Insoumise (LFI, a left-wing party) and the PCF (the Communist party), which moreover declared themselves in favour of sending French weapons to Kiev in November 2022, and de facto accept Nato, they at best choose to overlook these absolutely vital issues in favour of electoral alliances, at the expense of what Jean-Luc Mélenchon until recently called “French independentism” … All of this is unfortunately factual, easily verifiable and in no way a gratuitous ‘polemic’!
Pro-imperialist warmongering ‘antifascism’?
Worse still, in reading the terms of the agreement signed between the PS, the LFI, the PCF and the Greens for the first round of the legislative elections in June, we find, in the section devoted to “the urgency of peace”:
“To defeat Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, and make him answer for his crimes before the international courts: to unfailingly defend the sovereignty and freedom of the Ukrainian people and the integrity of its borders, by delivery of the necessary weapons.”
In short, our proclaimed ‘antifascists’ agree to continue arming Kiev and to further increase the warmongering involvement of the EU-Nato (Nato is not even mentioned in the programme: in short, it is apparently a fait accompli [a done deal] and beyond discussion) when we are one step away from a European, or even global conflagration, potentially even worse from the point of view of the possible devastation, than those of 1914 and 1939!
In short, still less than in 1936, the antifascist struggle today cannot be dissociated from the fight against imperialism, defence of national independence and popular mobilisation in order to tie the hands, if there is still time, of the Euro-Atlanticist successors of Hitler in their determination to subject the entire world to their global hegemony.
For behind the deceitful narrative of the media and the false left, from Biden to Glucksmann, the defence of kind-hearted democratic Ukraine (riddled with neo-nazis even in the entourage of Zelensky) is not the concern of the Euro-Atlanticist world hegemonist bloc, nor the independence of Taiwan – while Washington and its vassals, led by Macron and his ruling circle, refuse any self-determination for Donbass and Crimea – but simply whether the world order will remain eternally dominated by the US army in the service of the king dollar, or whether the world can move towards a multilateral order giving an equal place to each country, each language and each culture.
And don’t tell us that recalling these obvious facts would be tantamount to politically validating Vladimir Putin, because in Russia, as in Ukraine, where they are moreover banned and persecuted, we support the communist parties, and not the counter-revolutionary destroyers of the USSR that social democracy, the Greens and Trotskyites of all stripes praised to the skies in 1989, when this entire brood were noisily applauding the Lech Walesas, Mikhail Gorbachevs and Boris Yeltsins.
These people are your creatures and not ours, worthy heroes of the anticommunist ‘left’ who still fail to understand that anti-Sovietism and anticommunism always and everywhere nurture fascism and its twin, world war.
Fighting fascism means fighting capitalism
More than ever, therefore, a genuine antifascist popular front must also be an anti-capitalist front, a front against the instigators of world war, a front for national independence and social progress. Of course, there should be no trivialisation of Bardella, who must be fought as a priority, along with the liberticidal Macron regime and all of their respective hangers-on. But nor should there be any political smuggling, consisting in foisting Glucksman-type leaders of the militarist ‘left’ on sincere antifascists, under the pretext of a dubious ‘popular front’.
A union of struggle of the true popular, antifascist, patriotic and peace-loving left. This is the question that confronts the grassroots activists of the trade unions, the PCF and the LFI, who need to definitively stop clinging to the lead lifebuoy of the false social-imperialist left … and naively following leaders who, while inveighing against the democratic centralism of Lenin and Robespierre, lead their supposedly ‘gaseous’ and ‘democratic’ movements like total despots …
In a word, what we need is an Antifascist, Peaceful, Patriotic, Popular and Ecologist Front (FRAPPE) rooted in the masses, as tirelessly proposed by the PRCF, without separating this task of achieving unity from the urgent reconstruction of the French and international workers’ movement’s fighting tools: a vanguard Communist party bringing the class enemy’s manoeuvres to light and a class-based trade unionism resolutely passing over to the counteroffensive.
