Marx and Marchais Totter in France
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
DIM PROSPECTS FORTHEPCF Marx and Marchais Totter in France BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris In the mid-1970s, many French teachers and their students saw Karl Marx as the man of the future. In my...
...Nevertheless, the seed of doubt had been sown...
...Jean-Paul Sartre considered the labor camps "part of the historical process...
...My philosophy teacher preferred Mao's Little Red Book to Plato's Republic...
...After burying Communism, Russians are discovering the joys of capitalism—inflation and unemployment," a newscaster declared on the state-run radio in the first week of January...
...The PCF limped home with 3 per cent...
...Communists tend to benefit in local balloting from the dedication of their members...
...Answer: "Both are endangered species...
...The international scene is becoming very complicated," an apparently baffled Georges Marchais, the PCF's Secretary General, said recently...
...In a memorable interview on French television, the Russian novelist described life in the USSR and its labor camps...
...Unrepentant Left-wingers, furious to see America unrivaled on the international scene, lament the death of Utopia...
...University was more of the same, with Marxist-dominated student unions whose leaders believed ballot boxes were there to be smashed...
...Some believe a new party may rise from the ashes of the PCF, possibly in alliance with Left-wing Socialists disillusioned by their party's centrist trend...
...Yet overall Communism has been treated in France with greater respect than perhaps any other "ism...
...a humorist asked during a radio program on New Year's Day...
...The Communist-led CGT is still France's biggest trade union, but its members place the interests of their respective crafts well ahead of the "class struggle": A one-day general strike last October was a flop...
...Others, though, are reassessing Marxism's most damning sham, the dictatorship of the proletariat, recalling the "40 million victims of Stalinism"—as editor Jacques Julliard has done in the Left-of-Center Nouvel Observateur?and rethinking the Soviet Union with the help of a former Marxist, novelist Andre Gide...
...Cassandra-like, it has wailed about resurgent anti-Semitism and fascism?never saying, of course, that Soviet Russia was just as anti-Jewish as Tsarist Russia, or that national and ideological prejudices of the 1930s have emerged intact from the Communist deepfreeze to be microwaved back into life...
...In the second half of the '70s came a Nobel Prize and exile for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Marxism appealed to trade-unionists, teachers and journalists, who admired, envied and despised the U.S...
...Picasso, Sartre and others condemned the 1956 invasion...
...for its (to European eyes) larger-than-life successes on film screens and battlefields?until the Vietnam morass provided them with a stick to beat America with...
...Today's 14-25-year-olds prefer to entrust their future to the Socialists (32 per cent), the Center-Right Alliance (22 per cent) and the Greens (19 per cent), according to an opinion poll published in the January issue of LeMondedel'Education...
...Regis Debray, a writer who belongs to the personal entourage of President Francois Mitterrand, considers that Communism "inspired the finest vital and libertarian passions of our century: Its death may soon stifle us all...
...In December he appointed a loyal party technocrat, Pierre Zarka, to replace the aging editor Roland Leroy...
...Bernard Frederick, the Moscow correspondent of L 'Humanite until last June, accuses him of obtaining knowledge of the August coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev during a secret visit to Moscow in July...
...The invasion of Hungary lost the PCF some of its brightest believers, such as the historian Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie...
...1936...
...Marchais retains an iron grip on L 'Humanite...
...The daily unflaggingly supported the hard-liners against Gorbachev, whose incompetence it blames for food shortages and nationalist tensions...
...At a meeting of the PCF Central Committee last month, he blocked a debate on Europe on the grounds that the issue had already been discussed...
...Add the Greens, who appeal to today's students and to the ex-Marxist ones of the 1970s, and there doesn't seem to be much room left for Karl in France these days—unless he can hold out long enough for discontent and confusion in Eastern Europe to send the pendulum swinging his way again...
...A bitter strike paralyzed many French universities in 1976...
...Pretending to distance itself from Moscow, the PCF flirted timidly with "Eurocommunism'' and coined the slogan "Communisme a la francaise...
...Marchais' leadership was considered "negative" by 51 per cent of the sympathizers...
...No such questioning, however, for Georges Marchais...
...Yet an opinion poll carried out during the annual Fete de l'Huma in the autumn suggests the rank-and-file are losing their Marxist faith...
...With his dark beetling brows, pugnacious manner and staggering aplomb, Marchais has long been the butt of interviewers and humorists...
...69 per cent of them (and 43 per cent of the members) thought he should step down (41 per cent of the members thought he should stay, the rest wouldn't say...
...Diehards are to be found among aging members who describe the party as their "family," those trade-unionists who still believe in class struggle, and people frightened by the rise of Jacques Le Pen's National Front...
...Why, in some countries there are two, even three Communist parties...
...In defiance of Marchais, Herzog has launched a cross-party opinion club, Confrontations, with the support of former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, a Socialist, and prominent businessmen...
...He attributes the growth of Communism in France in the late '40s and early '50s to the "guilt feeling" caused by pro-Hitler collaboration during World War II...
...In fact it remained Western Europe's most orthodox bastion, along with Portugal's Communist Party, and backed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...The faculty argued out the literary curriculums on Left-Right lines...
...Marianne Nizan, an actress and the granddaughter of the Communist writer Paul Nizan, considers "the leaders of the PCF hopeless...
...In the 1930s its friends included poets like Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, surrealists like Andre Breton and Luis Bunuel...
...Gulag" became a household word—but a nonword in the Communist daily L 'Humanite, where Solzhenitsyn was accused of being a traitor and a reactionary...
...Entrenched with a fistful of conservatives in huge, lavish headquarters, he refuses to haul down the red flag...
...Opinion polls give the PCF about 6 per cent of the vote in regional elections due in March...
...Other Communists who challenge Marchais' leadership, such as former Minister of Transportation Charles Fiterman, are cautiously waiting until after the March elections...
...People shocked by the 1968 replay in Czechoslovakia turned toward the still small Socialist Party if Janice Vaixs-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairsfor the NL...
...Editorials whine that the death of L 'Humanite would be "a blow to pluralism" and continue to back Marchais, who remains locked in the past...
...He was publicly criticized by Philippe Herzog, an economist, who had called for the debate...
...Surely there is no country today, not even Hitler's Germany, where the human spirit is less free, more apprehensive, more enslaved," Gide wrote in...
...Ironically, this is true in electoral terms: Part of the Communist electorate has gone over to the National Front, which excels at exploiting the discontent of low-income workers who see themselves competing with Arab and African immigrants for unskilled jobs and rundown lodgings...
...Soviet funding has long since dried up...
...moderate, or took up China-gazing if incurably Left-wing like Sartre and the film director Jean-Luc Godard...
...Former Marxist teachers have sought refuge in feminism and structuralism...
...the previous year...
...The novelist Romain Rolland was upset by Stalin's purges, but believed they should be kept quiet...
...Why is Marchais like a whale...
...One sympathizer in two was uncertain whether to vote for the PCF in March, one in four believed the party should close down altogether, while 51 per cent of its members and 79 per cent of its sympathizers said it should change its political line "in depth...
...Two years later the French Communist Party (PCF) obtained 20.4 per cent of the vote in the Presidential election...
...The paper's sales have crumbled in France and Eastern Europe...
...When actor-singer Yves Montand, once sympathetic to the USSR, died in November, obituaries noted his one-man campaign against Communism during the 1980s, which was so successful that friends wanted him to run for the French Presidency...
...Marchais has never hidden his mistrust of the "Social Democrat," and in the days following the Soviet President's house arrest L. Humanite described the plotters as the USSR's "new leadership...
...Throughout the postwar period, French Communism fed on the chauvinist, anti-American mood that became almost a national policy after Charles de Gaulle seized power in 1958...
...In my small-town lycee, the contents of some programs varied with the teachers' political preferences, so while one class studied Japan and the United States, ours discovered the wonders of collective farming and five-year plans in China and the USSR...
...just as the assumption that one's parents had been Nazis caused young Germans to turn to extremism in the '60s...
...But she worries that "the collapse of Communism strengthens the National Front...
Vol. 75 • January 1992 • No. 1
