Mediapart: In your book you refer to the striking statistics of the exodus of blue-collar workers from the ranks of the French Communist Party. In 2008, they represented just 9% of party congress delegates, compared with 13% in 2001 and 45% in the 1970s. Why is this?
Julian Mischi: These figures are striking because, during the same period, the population of blue-collar workers has far from diminished to the same degree. Blue-collar workers still [today] make up 23% of the French active population. These figures are also so striking because the PCF claimed, a few years back, to be ‘the party of the working class’. Blue-collar workers, and more generally the lower social classes, are represented less and less at the top of the party. Even if the PCF maintains a more working-class militant base than other parties, the logic [resulting] from the exclusion from politics of the less favoured social classes is present here, making the party today one that is dominated by teachers and managers from regional public services.
The promotion of militants of working-class origins is no longer a priority for the PCF. This was made possible in the past, through a voluntarism on the part of the organisation, by the selection and training of leaders who had to reflect the image of ‘workers’ in whose name the political struggle was led. Since then, the first objective is the electoral survival of the organisation. The result is that the social inequalities in the share of political discourse [also] naturally appear. Those with the most diplomas occupy the top places. Those who consider themselves, or who are seen to be, the most competent in political career-making are valorised. Staff of elected political representatives, cabinet heads, technical-administrative managers, and heads of projects are particularly numerous in the leadership body.
Mediapart: In your book you explain that this separation from the working class is not only due to structural evolutions in the labour market and conditions of habitat. In what way is it also due to the political policies and practices of the PCF?
J.M.: The transformations in the lifestyle and working conditions of the lower social classes over the recent period disfavour their engagement inmilitant [political] action. But, indeed, there are also obstacles placed by the organisation, firstly with its political line. The PCF no longer places greater priority to giving power to the working class. It now wants to address everyone, and to represent French society in its diversity. The class line tends to withdraw behind a humanist, consensual rhetoric on the theme of participative democracy and citizenship. This line is insufficient to draw those who are dominated into joining the PCF.
But it is above all at the level of the organisation that it’s possible to identify the obstacles in the way of the lower social classes joining the PCF. [The party] has not abandoned the lower social classes as much as they themselves have left it because they no longer find their place there. A whole system of training and valorisation of militants from working-class backgrounds has crumbled at the same time as the leaders broke off with the authoritarian practices of centralised democracy. The rejection of the Stalinist past was accompanied by suspicions about the militants’ structures, regarded as forms of indoctrination. Whereas the force of the collective and the organisation are essential for giving tools to the lower social classes and to counter their political domination [by others].
Mediapart: Yet in your book you explain that the so-called working-class weighted political line adopted by Georges Marchais, the party’s leader from 1972 to 1994, was also strongly opposed by the party’s blue-collar cells.
J.M.: Yes, a working-class [weighted] policy line was established by the party leadership at the end of the 1970s, just after a period of opening up to the middle classes and forming an alliance with the Socialist Party. In reality it was an instrument in the internal struggle against thinkers and dissidents who refused a sectarian turn. The call [for the party] to re-orientate in priority towards the working class legitimised, in reality, a retreat of the organisation within itself and around Georges Marchais and the party staff of working-class origin.
The internal archives that I have been able to consult show very well that this line prompted a rejection not only on the part of teachers and other intellectual professions, but also in certain working-class and trades union circles which did not recognise themselves in the caricatured images that were made of workers. There are, for example, traces of contestation against the [policy line of] working-class orientation in the working-class regions of Longwy [in eastern France] and [the western port of] Saint-Nazaire.
These critical attitudes from within the [party’s ranks from the] lower social classes are little-known, because they remained internal. The size of the contestation from 1978 and all through the 1980s was hidden by a strong self-censorship on the part of working-class militants. They did not want their dissident views to be aired outside the party, which could have played into the hands of its opponents.
Mediapart: Has the French Communist Party remained a prisoner of the white, male working class of the major industrial heartlands? Is its current disconnection with the lower social classes also the fruit of its incapacity - resistance even- to address itself to immigrants?
J.M.: Historically, the PCF has been an important tool in the mobilization and defence of immigrant workers and workers who are the children of immigrants, those from southern Europe in particular. But it had difficulties in maintaining its influence with the new generations of workers, made up in part of workers from the Maghreb. This gap is an important one in the 1960s and 1970s. It above all signifies a retraction of the networks of the PCF and [its trade union ally] the CGT [which turned] towards skilled workers and technicians, whereas the new immigrant workers often held poorly-skilled posts. They belong to the inferior fractions within the lower social classes, while the PCF, in its battle with the bourgeoisie, valorised the aspects of a working class seen as being ‘respectable’; highly-qualified men, of French nationality but often descending from old waves of immigration– Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and so on.
The entry into the PCF of children of Algerian or Moroccan immigrants is even more difficult as of the 1980s when they came onto a destabilised labour market, [and became] affected by unemployment and precarious living conditions. The trades union is often absent from their working world, whereas becoming unionised with the CGT was traditionally the matrix for the lower social classes in joining the PCF. On top of that there is the coyness of Communists towards these new figures of the lower social classes, notably in Communist-run urban suburbs. The political discourse about solidarity between national and foreign workers tended to disappear, at the start of the 1980s, in favour of ‘the fight against the establishment of ghettos’.
You say that today, in the texts that appear at party congresses or in the discussions among the party’s leadership, representation of the lower social classes has totally disappeared from the agenda. Yet, when elections are held, the importance of the working-class vote is regularly underlined in comments from the Socialist Party to the far-left, all of whom are concerned about the vote that is going to the far-right Front National. How do you explain this flagrant contradiction?
There are two different issues in your question. The electoral representation of the lower social classes of course remains a central issue for the Communist leaders, as also for the leaders of other political parties. On the other hand, the representation of the lower classes among its militants is no longer a major subject of preoccupation within the leadership. The necessity of giving power to militants of a working-class background in the organisation and town halls, to have working-class spokespeople, is rarely mentioned. It is essentially only with regard to electoral stakes that the question of the lower social classes is raised. Blue collar workers and employees are above all solicited as voters, along with other social categories.
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- Julian Mischi’s book Le Communisme désarmé – Le PCF et les classes populaires depuis les années 1970 is published in France by Agone, priced 20 euros.
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This is an abridged version of the interview conducted in French and which can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse