Deja Vu

November 24, 2008

Socialism? Socialism!

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elections,

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“French Socialists Face Division and Derision After Vote for Leader,” The New York Times, Nov. 24, 2008.

PARIS — France’s Socialist Party found itself deeply divided on Sunday and, even worse, harshly mocked. A summer of embarrassing rivalries has culminated in an excruciatingly narrow and disputed vote for a new party leader that is likely to please chiefly the country’s center-right president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Socialists are known for their intellectual disputes; part of the leadership race involved a vote on political platforms written or supported by the various candidates. But much worse for the party, it is now being ridiculed for its personal enmities and rivalries, making it seem less a serious political alternative than an afternoon soap opera.

Jean-Michel Normand, writing for Monday’s Le Monde, a newspaper sympathetic to the party, said bluntly: “You have to believe with the Socialist Party that the worst is always to come.” After a summer marked by open feuding by several candidates for party leader, he wrote, the party “could not imagine a more execrable ending — an unfinished election, followed by accusations of fraud.”

The weekly newspaper Journal du Dimanche wondered whether the “s” in the party’s acronym stood for “suicidal” rather than “Socialist,” and the front-page headline shouted: “So Much Hatred!” The paper suggested the party could split, while the front page of Le Parisien showed the party’s rose symbol cut in two, with the headline: “The Rift.”

“Socialist Unity,” by Jean Jaurès (trans. Ted Crawford), 1899.
As a vehement pro-Dreyfusard, Jean Jaurès climbed the ranks of French socialism during the 1880s and ‘90s. When various elements of the French Left coalesced into the French Socialist Party in 1902, Jaurès was named party leader. He held the post until 1905, when the French Socialist Party combined with the Socialist Party of France to form the French Section of the Workers’ International.

Moving slowly, but irresistibly, the French Socialist Party makes towards unity; and unquestionably when in 1900 the international Socialist Congress assembles at Paris, French Socialism will be thoroughly organised to give a welcome to the proletariat of both worlds. No one in our party, any longer disputes the necessity for closer union of all its elements. The ancient organisations have rendered, and still render, excellent services, but their too-dispersed efforts have not been so efficacious as they might have been. Moreover, for some years, all the active ones have been seeking the means to organise unity of action.

It is in Parliament that Socialist unity has first found a medium. On the morrow of the elections of 1893 a Socialist group, still a little mixed, but powerful, was constituted in the Chamber. Representatives of nearly all the organisations, the French Workers Party, the Central Revolutionary Committee, the Possibilist fraction (Broussists), independent Socialists who accepted collectivism or communism, deliberated there amicably; the recollection of the long and bitter struggles of the past were nearly abolished. Even the heterogeneous elements were slipping into the group. The ancient Boulangists, the Socialist-Radicals, who imagined that Socialism amounted simply to declaiming against the financiers, became merged in the Socialist party, properly so-called. In revenge, the deputies of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party withdrew themselves from this medley, from this confusion, and would not take part, officially, in the Socialist group. They retained amicable relations with it, but were not properly enrolled in it.

This confusion could not last, and an apparent union could not be bought by an equivoque. It was necessary to define the principles of the party. Millerand delivered the address at Saint Mandé, and, some days after, the Socialist group clearly formulated its doctrine: socialisation of capitalist property, conquest of political power by the organised working-class party, international union and action of the workers. At a stroke, the Boulangist elements and pseudo-Socialists were thrown out: the division did not become very apparent to the people until the Dreyfus affair; but it was already accomplished. The Socialist group of the new Chamber numbers none but Socialists, and all the Socialists in the Chamber, whether they belong to the French Workers’ Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Federation of Socialist Workers of the Seine, the Revolutionary Socialist Workers party, or the Independents, are members of it. Thus, so far as Parliament is concerned, Socialist unity is definitely constituted.

But as Parliamentary life does not sure up the whole of life, does not cover all the activity of the Socialist party, it is necessary to nave a more extensive organisation — one which will comprise all the forces of Socialists and respond to every extension of its task. It is inevitable that unity, realised in the Parliamentary order; must extend to every action of the party. This was expressly what the 10,000 Parisian Socialists, who met together at the Tivoli Vauxhall fourteen months ago, wished to signify. The organisations there had received a mandate to seek a form of organic and permanent unity without abdicating their autonomy. We cannot say that they have yet agreed upon a complete and durable formula, but they draw nearer to it every day….

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