PARIS — Over 750,000 people demonstrated in 288 May Day marches and rallies across France today. The predominant theme was opposition to French president Nicolas Sarkozy and consequently support for Socialist François Hollande, his opponent in the May 6 presidential election.
However, this is no real choice at all. Hollande is a servant of the French bosses as much as Sarkozy, and will govern France in their interests. And the bosses’ interests are diametrically opposed to those of the working class.
As the satirical weekly “Le Canard enchaîné” (4/11) indicated, after the May 6 elections, “France will have to continue to borrow billions of euros each month....Now, the experts say, it is very likely that the financial markets will cause the interest rates France must pay to soar, hence worsening the government’s budgetary situation....The future government can only do one thing: increase taxes even more than announced, and make cruel budget savings in every domain.”
In other words, the third, 8-billion-euro austerity plan demanded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on November 28 will be imposed, no matter who is president.
This is not what workers here want. As André, a 54-year-old cleaning agent who marched in Nantes, said: “I’m here to defend what is left to be defended before they destroy everything — the minimum wage, the fifth week of paid vacation and retirement pensions. I favor keeping our social gains; people died for them.”
But instead of organizing workers to fight, the trade unions that assembled France’s May Day marches have steered them into electoral illusions. The three “class-struggle” unions — the CGT, FSU and Solidaires — spurred workers to vote for the “lesser evil,” while the two outright “class-collaboration” unions — the CFDT and UNSA — fell short even of this level of pseudo-class consciousness, and simply urged workers to vote.
But workers’ goals cannot be reached through reformist electoral politics. The working class cannot depend on the union hacks to tell the hard truth — that only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can ensure us a decent life. It’s the job of communists, here and everywhere, to bear witness to that truth and to organize to make it happen.