From Débat Militant, a newsletter published by a current in the LCR. As everyone can see, the big trade union confederations have opposed any idea of generalising a movement across different industries. As for the parliamentary left, it has no presence in the social confrontations going on now. The crisis hitting the Communist Party and the Greens is expressed by the almost complete absence of those organisations in the movement.
The Socialist Party leaders basically agree with the "reforms", and themselves helped to pave the way for them when they were in government; they have found no other loophole for trying to exploit the political difficulties of the Right than to criticise the "form" of the measures. That is, when they don't openly support the Government, as Ségolène Royal [presidential candidate for the SP earlier this year] did when she declared that "university autonomy is a good reform", or Emmanuel Vals [an SP member of the Legislative Assembly and mayor of Evry], when he regrets that the SP has not clearly taken a position in favour of the reform of the special [pension] regimes [for railworkers and others, allowing a full pension with 37.5 rather than 40 years' contributions].
[The daily newspaper] Libération, quoting a member of the Legislative Assembly from the UMP [Sarkozy's party], writes: "Between Sarkozy and Besancenot [a leader of the revolutionary left organisation LCR] there is nothing". This formula reflects, in caricature to be sure, a part of reality.
In the current social context, the far left, and the LCR in particular, in fact appears as the only organised political opposition on the side of the workers in struggle, facing up to the bosses' and Government offensive...
The [business] newspaper Les échos, in an article entitled "War of the Lefts", sees in the growing prominence of the far left only the result of a demagogic and opportunist policy basing itself on discontents which are impossible to satisfy and making "war" against the parties of the institutional left with no aim but to gain members for the far-left organisations. Reality is very far from such lucubrations.
The sympathy for our ideas which we get, directly and broadly, in the demonstrations and in our public interventions, is not the fruit of demagogic manipulations. It is the illustration of the fact that the ideas which we defend offer the beginnings of a response to the political needs of the workers in their struggles against the bosses and the government...
Only the revolutionary left organisations assert loudly and clearly the legitimacy of the workers' demands. Only they pose the conflicts clearly as class conflicts, between an arrogant boss class served by a Sarkozy at its disposal, and the workers of the public and private sectors...
