New Anti-capitalist Party covers for union betrayal of French oil strike

By Alex Lantier, World Socialist Web Site

The isolation and betrayal of the French oil strike against the pension cuts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a major political experience for the working class internationally, as well as for workers in France still striking against Sarkozy. After two weeks of strikes and police strikebreaking, against which the unions organized no mass protests or sympathy strikes, the oil workers voted Friday to return to work.

A significant political consequence is the exposure of the class-collaborationist politics of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of Olivier Besancenot. It has responded to this event by shamelessly covering for the betrayal of the unions and the bourgeois “left,” with deceitful pseudo-radical rhetoric.

The exposure of the NPA's politics is a critical question of class strategy for workers. Their objective function is to prevent workers from breaking with the union bureaucracy, which has made its strategy clear: to isolate and sell out every section of the working class that struggles against Sarkozy's cuts. In protecting the unions, the NPA is acting as direct opponents of the strategy advanced by the World Socialist Web Site: forming committees of action independent of the unions and the “left” parties, to organize mass political strikes to bring down the Sarkozy government.

Besancenot, who was silent in the last week of the oil strike, gave an extensive interview to Le Parisien yesterday. Remaining totally silent on the issue of Sarkozy's strike-breaking and the complicity of the unions, he gave a pass to the unions and the bourgeois “left” parties.

Asked about the “wearing out of the [strike] movement,” Besancenot replied: “We were quite close to obtaining a long-term general strike.”

One wonders how Besancenot could possibly have arrived at this conclusion. Not only was there no serious attempt to organize a general strike, but no struggle was waged against the public opponents of a general strike. These included the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union and its leader Bernard Thibault, and the rest of the union bureaucracy.

Thibault denounced the call for a general strike as “abstruse, unclear.” As subsequent events have made clear, Thibault's opposition to a general strike was part of a broader strategy of isolating strikers and negotiating with management behind the backs of the workers. Not only did Thibault abstain from defending oil workers from state attack, but the CGT is now refusing to disclose the details of the deal it negotiated, under which the Marseille oil terminals have gone back to work.

Yet no one in the “left” political establishment has moved to expose the rotten role played by the CGT. As Le Monde noted gratefully last week, Besancenot was among those who avoided criticizing Thibault and other bureaucrats. It wrote: “Compared to the beginning of October, Olivier Besancenot has put away his criticisms of unions, which he described as a bit weak, and his calls for a 'new May 1968.'”

Claiming that the unions “got close” to a general strike is to lie shamelessly about their betrayal of the workers' struggle.

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