At the gates of the factory a young worker was shot down in cold blood by a boss's cop. This took place not in Barcelona or Cordoba, but at Boulogne-Billancourt: The factory was not Citroen or Simca, but Renault - the "workers stronghold'!
What did the PCF (French Communist Party) do? •Did it call the State management to account? Did it mobilise the workers nationally against the worsening of the repression in the factories and above all against the penetration of the bosses" private army?
In other circumstances, it would probably have done so. But there was a problem: the assassinated worker was a Maoist militant newly sacked from Renault where he had been active in the Committee for Struggle'. It was because of this that the bureaucrats saw red! The scandal of the bosses' armed guards was pushed into the background. Push the blame on to the ultra-lefts! "What a monstrous crime by the ultra-leftist groups, said Party secretary Georges Marchais in Strasbourg. It was "staged by paid agents, ultra-left commandos and plain clothes cops all mixed up", claimed the PCF section at Renault. In the propaganda of the PCF stupidity vies with bad faith in the best Stalinist tradition: the assassin and the victim are put on the same level, presented as if they were accomplices: both are State agents; Overney happened to get the role of the killed, Tramoni of the killer-that's all. After reading the editorial of L 'Humanite (PCF daily paper) on the day after the murder one could have sworn that the assassin only fired a blank and that Overney got up five minutes after his accomplices had taken him away out of sight! The amalgam between the various leftist organisations and the right and ultra-right formations is carried out with creasing repression by the bosses in the factories, and especially against the penetration of the bosses' private police.
Whether the PCF likes it or not, this deterioration is not the consequence of "ultraleft provocations". It is the result of the high level of working class combativity to which May '68 gave birth. New aims, new forms of struggle have become a habit. The rejection of the capitalist organisation of work has qualitatively increased at the same time as capitalist production demands an increase in discipline to cope with more arduous work. Just as at the level of the State the bourgeoisie gives itself the means to face the new sharpening of the class struggle by reinforcing its apparatus of repression and manipulation, in the same way at the level of the factories, the bosses adapt their means of repression to the level of the workers combativity. The idea that it is the acts of agents provocateurs which "explain" the increase in the bosses' viciousness is worthy of the small mind of a police inspector. The PCF behaves in every way possible cedence over anti-leftist broadsides which occupied, for once, a secondary place. A DEMOBILISATION CAMPAIGN Thus, it took the PCF a week to devote some of its energy to the fight against the factory police and not primarily against the "ultra-lefts". But the demobilising effect of this campaign has been tremendous. A battle of the highest importance from the point of view of the workers has been deliberately sabotaged by the PCF apparatus, in its ow. specific interests. The revolutionary militants will draw the lessons of this to the attention of the workers.
-Henri Weber NOTES:
1. FSI - The Indo-China Solidarity Front initiated by the Communist League and based on the principle of solidarity with the Indochinese revolution 2. CFPM - Centre for the Professional Education of 1 cachers The above is taken from a slightly longer article published in Rouge, weekly paper of the Ligue Communiste, French Section of the Fourth International.
The Red Mole 13 March 1972 Page 5
out the management's functions. In this situation the union gets the worst of both worlds. Firstly the workers sacked put out by, for example, the Institute for Workers Control.
For example, when the government scheme