preparing the ground for the pact with Laval, which spoke of mutual assistance in the event of attack by Germany, When Laval visited Moscow early in May 1935, after signing the pact, he commented: "Mr Stalin understands and fully approves the politics of national defence undertaken by France in cruet to maintain her armed forces at a security prenure in the factories and streets.
Two months before the pact, CP leader Thunce hul reaffirmed his oppositlon to the two year military service and confirmed his revolutionary defeatism.
The day after the pact was signed all that was forgotten. The struggle against mitstary service was dropped, and evolutionary defeatism disappeared from the party right-wing president, Giscard d'Estaing. programme. The CP became 'the party of the French nation", directed towards acheiving a free strong and happy The right tum was complete. The basis bad been laid for an agreement with Elte party of the bourgeoise. The French working class were being callously betrayed in the interats of the Stalinist buresucracy in the Soviet Union. The Union of the Left in France today was born in June 1972, whon the Socialist and Communist Parties sigried a common progreme. A few months later, the Left Radicals joined. The fact thet Communists, Socialists and Radicals once again found themselves together opened a debate in the revolutionary movement over the tactics to be adopted towards this development.
The Popular Frant, as a bie of reformist and baurgeois parties, was based on a bourgeois programme of class collabore Tion. Refuems were only granted to the warking class under massive Without a doubt the programine of the Union of the Left is also a programme of compromise and class collaboration, and a such only serves to confuse the workers movement, For example, it proposes to compensate the boss for the limited nationalisations which it envisages. It wants to maintain the present constitution which was introduced by De Gaulle after the coup d'erat of 1968, It is quite happy about forming a left goveenment under a However, the very fact that the programme contains a perspective for nationalisation as part of the struggle ogainst the monopolies - men though this is insufficient and unciar - marks a ditference from the programme of the Popular Front, Unlike that of the Popular Front, the Union of the Loft programme goes in the general direction of 'anti-monopoly struggle" and in the long run, abviously through a "democratic stage, to socialism.
The Union of the Left also plays a very different role. In 1935 the ruling class needed un alliance with the workers parties. They were worried by the threat of fascium in Germany: a section of capital saw the pomibility of a new market in the USSR; and they were confronted by a working class upsurge. Today the situation is different. Not only are the ruformists unable to control the upsurge completely, but the bourgeoisie has a different project. It is not a question of integration, but of repression and breaking the working class.
Today there is no direct alliance betwen sections of the ruling cless and the workers parties, The Radicals heve been decimatec and cannot be compored with the Darty al Dalsdier in 1935, which was then the major bourgols party, The handful of Left Radicals in the Union of the Left represent nothing more than a few Individuals en route to the Socialist Party.
However there is no doubt that the aim of the Union of the Left is to attract a wing of the bourgeoisis, The CP, for instance, • maning a big play tor the counts wren tos accusation thal Giscard is selling out 'nationat independence', In certain circumstances such an alliance dould become possible. But at ahe moment che Union of the Left is an ailianca between two reformist workers parties pius some token Left Fledicals.
The Union of the Left was not established to 'bar the daor to fascism as was the Popular Front. On the contrary, the SP and CP realise that the socialist revolution is on the agende and that they must find same means of controlling the maus. They therefore propose & 'pesoelul and perlismentary road to social. ism', Rather than demanding that the CP and SP break with the Left Radicals, a negligible force, revolutionary Marxists must counterpose a revolutionary road to socialism through the develapment and coordination of the kind of independent class action Seen in the early days of June 1938.
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