Europe is lurching to the left after the revolutionary uprising in France, and the defeat of Berlusconi in Italy.
Millions of French workers and youth took to the streets to smash the CPE ‘Hire and Fire’ law for youth, brushing aside the CRS riot police in the process, and humbling the chief representatives of the French capitalist state, its President Chiraq and Prime Minister Villepin.
Yesterday, the students and youth were marching all over France to make sure that every clause in the hated CPE law is ripped up. They are determined to make a better life for the French youth and all youth, meaning that they are going to smash all of the plans to impose bourgeois slave labour schemes on youth for the benefit of the bosses, and go forward to socialism.
They carry forward the revolutionary tradition of 1789, fortified by a class consciousness acquired from the workers’ insurrections of the first half of the 19th century, culminating in the Paris Commune of 1870, the first attempt of the working class to take the power and to hold it, an attempt that inspired the leaders of the Russian 1905 revolution and the October revolution of 1917.
Marx and Engels learnt enormous lessons from the revolutionary struggles of the French workers’ principally the necessity for the establishment of a revolutionary leadership, and from the experience of the Paris Commune itself, the necessity of seizing all of the strongholds of the bourgeoisie such as the Bank of France.
The most decisive lesson that was learnt from the Commune however was on the nature of the state machine as a bourgeois institution, made up of bodies of armed men, trained and organised to serve the ruling class, and maintain capitalism through violence.
Marx declared that the Commune showed that the bourgeois state could not be taken over from the bourgeoisie and passed onto the working class, but that it would have to be smashed up and destroyed by the revolutionary movement of the working class and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat, a workers state, that would repress the minority into accepting the will of the majority.
These were crucial lessons for the working class of the whole world and were learnt and relearnt by the Bolsheviks in and after the 1905 Russian revolution and successfully applied in October 1917.
Now the French working class and youth have embarked on the revolutionary road full of confidence in their own strength, after brushing aside the CRS, and Chiraq and Villepin.
However, they will have to relearn the revolutionary lessons of their history, that have become part of the common history of the international working class, if they are to meet and defeat the counter-attack that the French bourgeoisie will organise.
The CPE attack on the French working class and youth sprang from the desperate nature of the world wide capitalist crisis, and the fact that the bourgeoisie must force the French workers to bear the full brunt of this crisis, or risk their entire capitalist economy going under.
The defeat just suffered by Chirac and Villepin has worsened the crisis of the French bosses, and the bosses of the world, meaning that they will be all the more desperate to change their leadership, and to make up the ground that they have lost by inflicting a major defeat on the working class.
What the revolutionary enthusiasm of the French working class and youth need in the days ahead is to have at its head a revolutionary party that embodies the historic lessons of the history of the working class movement, and the outlook and method of dialectical materialism, and is able to direct the struggle.
Only this type of party will be able to mobilise the working class and the youth in the period ahead to defeat the counter-attack of the bourgeoisie by organising the taking of power by the working class through a socialist revolution.
The spontaneous movement will not be able to deal with the political questions that are going to arise in the period ahead. It is the heart, but it must have a head. Now is the time to build the revolutionary party in France.
