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(Parti Communiste InternationalistePCI) headed byPierre Frank. They prevented the radicalisation of youthfrom developing into a serious revolutionary alternative

and so helped the Stalinists bring the general strikeunder control.At the end of the Second World War the PCF hadacquired considerable political authority due to thevictory of the Soviet Red Army over Nazi Germany andthe French partys own role in the anti-fascist Rsistancemovement. The French bourgeoisie inthe form of the Vichy regime had discredited itself

through its collaboration with the Nazis and there was apowerful yearning within the working class for a socialistsociety, which extended into the membership of thePCF. However, the leader of the PCF at that time,Maurice Thorez, used his entire political authority to re-establish bourgeois rule. Thorez personally participatedin the first post-war government established by deGaulle and was instrumental in ensuring the disarmingof the Rsistance.

Support gradually ebbed for the PCF due to its role inrestabilising bourgeois society in the post-war period.The party had lent its support to the colonial warsagainst Vietnam and Algeria and was further discreditedfollowing the revelation of Stalins crimes in the speechmade by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. This was followed

by the bloody suppression of popular uprisings byStalinist troops in Hungary and Poland. While in 1968the PCF was still the party with the biggest workingclass membership it had largely lost its authority amongstudents and youth.

In particular, the Communist Student Federation (Uniondes tudiants CommunistesUEC) was in profound

crisis. From 1963 onwards various fractions emerged inthe UECItalian (supporters of Gramsci and the

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Italian Communist Party), Marxist-Leninist (supportersof Mao Zedong) and Trotskyistwhich were thenexpelled and went on to establish their own

organizations. This period marked the origin of the so-called extreme left, whose appearance on the politicalscene marked the emerging break by an active part ofthe militant youth with the PCF, according to thehistorian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel in her book aboutthe 1968 movement. [1]

The authority of the CGT was also under increasingpressure in 1968. Rival trade unionssuch as ForceOuvrire and the CFDT (Confdration FranaiseDmocratique du Travail)at that time under theinfluence of the left-reformist Parti Socialiste Unifi(PSU)struck militant postures and challenged theCGT. The CFDT in particular was able to garner supportin the service sector and public services.

Under these circumstances the Pabloites organised in

the United Secretariat played a very important role indefending the authority of the Stalinists and making thesell-out of the general strike possible.

The origins of Pabloism

The Pabloite United Secretariat emerged in the early1950s as the result of a political attack against the

program of the Fourth International. The secretary of theFI, Michel Pablo, rejected the entire analysis ofStalinism that had formed the basis for the founding ofthe Fourth International by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

Following the defeat of the German proletariat in 1933,Trotsky concluded that the extent of the Stalinistdegeneration of the Communist International made any

policy based on the reform of the Internationaluntenable. Proceeding from the political betrayal of the

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German Communist Party, which had made possibleHitlers assumption of power, and the subsequentrefusal of the Communist International to draw any

lessons from the German disaster, Trotsky concludedthat the Communist parties had definitively gone over tothe side of the bourgeoisie. He insisted that the future ofrevolutionary struggle depended on the building of anew proletarian leadership, and wrote in the foundingprogram of the Fourth International: The crisis of theproletarian leadership, having become the crisis inmankinds culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth

International.Pablo rejected this view. He concluded from theemergence of new deformed workers states in EasternEurope that Stalinism could play a historicallyprogressive role in the future. Such a perspectiveamounted to the liquidation of the Fourth International.

According to Pablo there was no reason to construct

sections of the Fourth International independently of theStalinist mass organizations. Instead the task ofTrotskyists was reduced to entering existing Stalinistparties and supporting the presumed leftist elements intheir leaderships.

Pablo ended up rejecting the entire Marxist conceptionof a proletarian party that insists on the necessity of apolitically and theoretically conscious avant-garde. ForPablo the role of leadership could be allocated to non-Marxist and non-proletarian forces such as tradeunionists, left reformists, petty bourgeois nationalistsand national liberation movements in the colonial andformer colonial countries, which would be driven to theleft under the pressure of objective forces. Pablopersonally put himself at the service of the Algerian

National Liberation Front, the FLN (Front de Libration

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Nationale), and following its victory even joined theAlgerian government for a period of three years.

Pablos onslaught split the Fourth International. The

majority of the French section rejected his revisions andwas bureaucratically expelled by a minority led by PierreFrank. In 1953 the American Socialist Workers Partyresponded to the Pabloite revisions with a devastatingcritique and issued an Open Letter calling for theinternational unification of all orthodox Trotskyists. Thisbecame the basis for the International Committee of theFourth International (ICFI), which included the Frenchmajority.

However, the SWP did not maintain its opposition toPabloism for long. During the next 10 years the SWPincreasingly dropped its differences with the Pabloitesand eventually joined them to form the UnitedSecretariat (US) in 1963. In the meantime theleadership of the US had been taken over by Ernest

Mandel. Pablo played an increasingly secondary roleand left the United Secretariat soon afterwards. Thebasis for the reunification in 1963 was uncritical supportfor Fidel Castro and his petty bourgeois nationalist 26thof July Movement. According to the United Secretariatthe seizure of power by Castro in Cuba amounted to thesetting up of a workers state, with Castro, ErnestoChe Guevara and other Cuban leaders playing the roleof natural Marxists.

This perspective served not only to disarm the workingclass in Cuba, which never had its own organs of power;it also disarmed the international working class bylending uncritical support to Stalinist and pettybourgeois nationalist organizations and strengtheningtheir grip on the masses. In so doing, Pabloism

emerged as a secondary agency of imperialism, whose

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role became even more important under conditionswhere the older bureaucratic apparatuses wereincreasingly discredited in the eyes of the working class

and the youth.This was confirmed in Sri Lanka just one year after theunification of the SWP and the Pabloites. In 1964 aTrotskyist party with mass influence, the Lanka SamaSamaja Party (LSSP)joined a bourgeois coalitiongovernment with the nationalist Sri Lankan FreedomParty. The price paid by the LSSP for its entry intogovernment was to abandon the countrys Tamil

minority in favour of Sinhala chauvinism. The country isstill suffering the consequences of this betrayal, whichreinforced the discrimination of the Tamil minority andled to the bloody civil war that has plagued Sri Lanka forthree decades.

The Pabloites also played a crucial role in France inhelping maintain bourgeois rule in 1968. When one

examines their role during the key events, two thingsare striking: their apologetic stance with regard toStalinism and their uncritical adaptation to the anti-Marxist theories of the New Left, which predominatedin the student environment.

Alain Krivine and the JCRThe Fourth International had considerable influence inFrance at the end of the Second World War. In 1944 theFrench Trotskyist movement, which had split during thewar, reunited to form the Parti CommunisteInternationaliste (PCI). Two years later PCI had around1,000 members and put up 11 candidates inparliamentary elections, who received between 2 and 5percent of the vote. The organisations newspaperLa

Vritwas sold at kiosks and enjoyed a broadreadership. Its influence extended into other

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The biggest blow to the Trotskyist movement in France,however, was delivered by Pabloism. The PCI was bothpolitically and organizationally weakened by the

liquidationist policy of Michel Pablo and the subsequentexpulsion of a majority of the section by the Pabloiteminority. The PCI majority led by Pierre Lambert will bedealt with in the final part of this series. The Pabloiteminority led by Pierre Frank concentrated after the spliton providing practical and logistical support for thenational liberation movement, the FLN, in the Algerianwar. During the 1960s it had largely lost any influence

inside the factories. It did have support in studentcircles, however, and played an important role amongstsuch layers in 1968. Its leading member, Alain Krivine,was one of the best known faces of the student revoltalongside figures such as the anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the Maoist Alain Geismar.

Krivine had joined the Stalinist youth movement in 1955

at the age of 14 and in 1957 was part of an officialdelegation attending a youth festival in Moscow.According to his autobiography, it was there that he metmembers of the Algerian FLN and developed a criticalattitude towards the policies of the Communist Partywith regard to Algeria. One year later he began tocollaborate with the Pabloite PCI on the Algerianquestion. Krivine claims he was initially unaware of the

background of the PCI, but this is highly unlikely sincetwo of his brothers belonged to the leadership of theorganisation. In any event, he joined the PCI at thelatest in 1961, while continuing to officially work insidethe Stalinist student organization, the UEC (Union destudiants communistes).

Krivine quickly rose inside the leadership of the PCI and

the United Secretariat. From 1965 the 24-year-oldKrivine belonged to the top leadership of the party, the

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Political Bureau, alongside Pierre Frank and MichelLequenne. In the same year he was appointed to theexecutive committee of the United Secretariat as a

substitute for Lequenne.In 1966 Krivines section of the UEC at the University ofParis (La Sorbonne) was expelled by the Stalinistleadership for refusing to support the joint presidentialcandidate of the left, Franois Mitterrand. Together withother rebel UEC sections he went on to establish theJCR (Jeunesse Communiste Rvolutionnaire), whichconsisted almost exclusively of students and, unlike thePCI, did not expressly commit itself to Trotskyism. In

April 1969 the JCR and PCI then officially merged toform the Ligue Communiste (from 1974, LigueCommuniste RvolutionnaireLCR) after the Frenchinterior minister had banned both organisations a yearpreviously.

In retrospect, Krivine has sought to present the JCR in

1968 as a young and largely nave organizationcharacterised by heady enthusiasm but little politicalexperience: We were an organization of some hundredmembers, whose average age barely corresponded tothe legal age of adulthood at that time: twenty-oneyears. It is hardly necessary to note that driven by thenext most important task from one meeting anddemonstration to another we had no time to think thingsthrough. In view of our modest forces we felt at home inthe universities, on strike, and on the streets. Thesolution of the problem of government took place atanother level over which we had barely any influence.[2]

In fact, such claims simply do not stand up. Aged 27 in1968, Alain Krivine was still relatively young but had

already acquired considerable political experience. He

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had inside knowledge of Stalinist organizations and as amember of the United Secretariat was entirely familiarwith the international conflicts within the Trotskyist

movement. At this time he had already left university,but then returned in order to lead the activities of theJCR.

The political activity of the JCR in May-June 1968cannot be put down to juvenile inexperience but wasinstead guided by the political line developed byPabloism in the struggle against orthodox Trotskyism.Fifteen years after its break with the Fourth Internationalthe United Secretariat had changed not only its politicalbut also its social orientation. It was no longer aproletarian current, but instead a petty bourgeoismovement. For one-and-a-half decades the Pabloiteshad sought the favours of careerists in the Stalinist andreformist apparatuses and wooed national movements.The social orientation of such movements had become

second nature for the Pabloites themselves. What hadbegun as a theoretical revision of Marxism had becomean organic part of their political physiognomyinsofaras it is permissible to transfer terms from the realm ofphysiology to politics.

In drawing the lessons from the defeat of the Europeanrevolutions of 1848 Marx distinguished the perspectiveof the petty bourgeois from that of the working class asfollows: The democratic petty bourgeois, far fromwanting to transform the whole society in the interests ofthe revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change insocial conditions which will make the existing society astolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible.[3] This characterisation applied equally in 1968 to thePabloites. This was clear from their uncritical attitude

towards anarchist and other petty bourgeoismovements, movements which had been

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uncompromisingly fought at an earlier date by Marx andEngels. It was also evident in the significance theyattached at that time and continue to attach today to

such issues as race, gender and sexual orientation; andin their enthusiasm for the leaders of nationalistmovements, which despise the working class andaswas the case with the Russian Populists fought byLeninorient themselves towards layers of the ruralmiddle class.

More Guevarist than Trotskyist

Above all, Krivines JCR was characterised by itscompletely uncritical support for the Cuban leadershipthe issue which lay at the heart of the unification whichtook place in 1963. The author of a history of the LCR,Jean-Paul Salles, refers to the identity of anorganization, which prior to May 68 appeared in manyrespects more Guevarist than Trotskyist. [4]

On October 19, 1967, 10 days after his murder inBolivia, the JCR organised a commemoration meetingfor Che Guevara in the Paris Mutualit. Guevarasportrait was pervasive at JCR meetings. In hisautobiography of 2006 Alain Krivine writes: Our mostimportant point of reference with regard to the liberationstruggles in the countries of the third world wasundoubtedly the Cuban revolution, which led us to beingcalled Trotsko-Guevarists ... In particular Che Guevaraembodied the ideal of the revolutionary fighter in oureyes. [5]

With its glorification of Che Guevara the LCR evadedthe urgent problems bound up with the building of aleadership in the working class. If there is a singlecommon denominator to be found in the eventful life ofthe Argentine-Cuban revolutionary, it is his unwavering

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hostility to the political independence of the workingclass. Instead, he represented the standpoint that asmall armed minoritya guerrilla troop operating in rural

areascould lead the path to socialist revolution,independently of the working class. This requiredneither a theory nor a political perspective. The actionand the will of a small group were crucial. The ability ofthe working class and the oppressed masses to attainpolitical consciousness and lead their own liberationstruggle was denied.In January 1968 the JCR newspaperAvant-Garde

Jeunessepropagated Guevaras conceptions asfollows: Irrespective of the current circumstances theguerrillas are called upon to develop themselves until,after a shorter or longer period, they are able to draw inthe whole mass of the exploited into a frontal struggleagainst the regime.

However, the guerrilla strategy pursued by Guevara in

Latin America could not so easily be transferred toFrance. Instead Mandel, Frank and Krivine ascribed therole of the avant-garde to the students. They glorifiedthe spontaneous activities of students and their streetbattles with the police. Guevaras conceptions served to

justify blind activism at the expense of any seriouspolitical orientation. In doing so, the Pabloitescompletely adapted to the anti-Marxist theories of the

New Left, which played a leading role amongststudents, thereby blocking the path to a genuine Marxistorientation.

There were hardly any recognizable political differencesbetween the Trotskyist Alain Krivine, the anarchistDaniel Cohn-Bendit, the Maoist Alain Geismar and otherstudent leaders who were prominent in the events of

1968. They showed up side by side in the street battlesthat took place in the Latin Quarter. Jean-Paul Salles

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writes: During the week of May 6-11 members of theJCR stood at the forefront and took part in all thedemonstrations alongside Cohn-Bendit and the

anarchistsincluding the night of the barricades. [6] OnMay 9, the JCR held a meeting prepared long before inthe Mutualit, in the Latin Quarter, scene of the fierceststreet battles at that time. Over 3,000 attended themeeting and one of the main speakers was DanielCohn-Bendit.

During the same period in Latin America the UnitedSecretariat unconditionally supported Che Guevarasguerrilla perspective. At its 9th World Congress held inMay 1969 in Italy, the US instructed its South Americansections to follow Che Guevaras example and unitewith his supporters. This meant turning their back on theurban-based working class in favour of an armedguerrilla struggle aimed at carrying the fight from thecountryside to the cities. The majority of delegates at

the congress supporting this strategy included ErnestMandel and the French delegates, Pierre Frank andAlain Krivine. They held firmly to this strategy for no lessthan 10 years, although the perspective of guerrilla-typestruggle was a source of dispute inside the UnitedSecretariat as its catastrophic consequences becameincreasingly visible. Thousands of young people whohad followed this path and taken up the path of guerrilla

struggle senselessly sacrificed their lives, while theactions of the guerrillaskidnappings, hostage takingand violent clashes with the armyonly served topolitically disorientate the working class.

The students as revolutionary avant-garde

The utterly uncritically stance taken by the Pabloites to

the role played by students is evident from a long articleover the May events written by Pierre Frank at the

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beginning of June 1968, shortly before the prohibition ofthe JCR.

The revolutionary vanguard in May is generally

conceded to have been the youth, Frank wrote, andadded: The vanguard, which was politicallyheterogeneous and within which only minorities wereorganized, had overall a high political level. Itrecognized that the movements object was theoverthrow of capitalism and the establishment of asociety building socialism. It recognized that the policyof peaceful and parliamentary roads to socialism and ofpeaceful coexistence was a betrayal of socialism. Itrejected all petty bourgeois nationalism and expressedits internationalism in the most striking fashion. It had astrongly anti-bureaucratic consciousness and aferocious determination to assure democracy in itsranks. [7]

Frank even went so far as to describe the Sorbonne as

the most developed form of dual power and the firstfree territory of the Socialist Republic of France. Hecontinued: The ideology inspiring the students ofopposition to the neo-capitalist consumer society, themethods they used in their struggle, the place theyoccupy and will occupy in society (which will make themajority of them white-collar employees of the state orthe capitalists) gave this struggle an eminently socialist,revolutionary, and internationalist character. Thestruggle by students demonstrated a very high politicallevel in a revolutionary Marxist sense. [8]

In reality there was no trace of revolutionaryconsciousness in the Marxist sense on the part of thestudents. The political conceptions that prevailedamongst students had their origin in the theoretical

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arsenal of the so-called New Left and had beendeveloped over many years in opposition to Marxism.

The historian Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey writes on the 68

movement in France: The student groups driving theprocess forward are groups, which explicitly basethemselves on the intellectual mentors of the New Leftor were influenced by their themes and critique, inparticular the writings of the Situationist International,the group around Socialisme ou barbarie andArguments. Both their strategy of action (direct andprovocative), and their own self conception (anti-dogmatic, anti-bureaucratic, anti-organizational, anti-authoritarian) fit into the system of coordinates of theNew Left. [9]

Rather than regarding the working class as arevolutionary class, the New Left saw workers as abackward mass fully integrated into bourgeois societyvia consumption and the media. In place of capitalist

exploitation the New Left emphasised the role ofalienation in its social analysisinterpreting alienation ina strictly psychological or existentialist sense. Therevolution was to be led not by the working class, butrather by the intelligentsia and groups on the fringe ofsociety. For the New Left, the driving forces were not theclass contradictions of capitalist society, but criticalthinking and the activities of an enlightened elite. Theaim of the revolution was no longer the transformation ofthe relations of power and ownership but social andcultural changes such as alterations to sexual relations.

According to the representatives of the New Left suchcultural changes were a prerequisite for a socialrevolution.

Two of the best-known student leaders in France and

Germany, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke, were

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both influenced by the Situationist International, whichpropagated a change of consciousness by means ofprovocative actions. Originally formed as a group of

artists with roots in the traditions of Dada andSurrealism, the Situationists stressed the significance ofpractical activities. As a recent article on theSituationists puts it: Activist disruption, radicalisation,the misuse, revaluation and playful reproduction ofconcrete everyday situations are the means to elevateand permanently revolutionize the consciousness ofthose in the omnipotent grip of the deep sleep arising

from all-pervasive boredom. [10]Such standpoints are light-years removed fromMarxism. They deny the revolutionary role of theworking class, which is rooted in its position in a societycharacterised by insurmountable class conflicts. Thedriving force of the revolution is the class struggle,which is objectively based. Consequently the task of

Marxist revolutionaries is not to electrify the workingclass with provocative activities but rather to elevate itspolitical consciousness and provide a revolutionaryleadership capable of enabling it to take upresponsibility for its own fate.

Not only did the Pabloites declare that the anarchist,Maoist and other petty bourgeois groups that played theleading role in the Latin Quarter demonstrated a veryhigh political level in a revolutionary Marxist sense(Pierre Frank), they put forward similar political points ofview and took part in their adventurous activities withenthusiasm.

The anarchist-inspired street battles in the Latin Quartercontributed nothing to the political education of workersand students and never posed a serious threat to the

French state. In 1968 the state had a modern police

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apparatus and an army that had been forged in thecourse of two colonial wars, and could rely on thesupport of NATO. It could not be toppled by the sort of

revolutionary tactics used in the 19th centuryi.e., thebuilding of barricades in the streets of the capital city.Even though the security forces were in the mainresponsible for the huge levels of violence thatcharacterised the street battles in the Latin Quarter,there was an undoubted element of infantilerevolutionary romanticism in the way in which thestudents eagerly assembled barricades and played their

game of cat and mouse with the police.To be continuedNotes:1. Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 1962-1968: Le champdes possibles in68: Une histoire collective, Paris: 20082. Daniel Bensaid, Alain Krivine, Mai si! 1968-1988:Rebelles et repentis, Montreuil: 1988, p. 393. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Speech to theCentral Authority of the Communist League4. Jean-Paul Salles, La Ligue communistervolutionnaire, Rennes: 2005, p. 495. Alain Krivine, a te passera avec lge, Flammarion:2006, pp. 93-946. Jean-Paul Salles, ibid., p. 527. Pierre Frank,Mai 68: premire phase de la

rvolution socialiste franaise8. Pierre Frank, ibid.9. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Mai 68 in Frankreichin 1968:Vom Ereignis zum Mythos, Frankfurt am Main:2008, p. 2510. archplus 183, Zeitschrift fr Architektur undStdtebau, May 2007

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