becomes a field of struggle by O. MILAN The regime's position The recent ministerial shakeup that eliminated Soufflet and replaced him with the Bourges-Bigeard team shows how sensitive the regime is, especially Giscard d'Estaing, to the problem of the army; at the same time, it indicates how the regime intends to resolve the problem. The struggles of the draftees were particularly unwelcome for the government. They raise a challenge to Giscardian "liberalism. " Brutal repression would further tarnish the image of a regime that claims, at least in words, to be different from Gaullism in that it is instituting a "less police-like" atmosphere in French society. In reality, the action of the military security services clearly shows what these electoral promises were worth. Giscard is trapped between the agitation in the barracks and the general crisis. To achieve a "reformist" solution by satisfying the demands of the draftees on some material points (pay increases, free transportation) would require a considerable financial commitment that the regime cannot afford under present conditions. That is why the various reforms that are promised can be only tiny ones in the purest style of the man with the accordion; they will be concessions of an "ideological" type, which cost nothing. And here again, there will be a problem: In the army, even reforms that cost nothing would partially challenge discipline, the hierarchy, and the barracks lifestyle. Even if they are not very im-
5
FRANCE portant, they will inevitably appear as concessions to the actions taken by the soldiers and will therefore further encourage such actions. Under these conditions, it is understandable why Giscard has not yet shared the results of his "week of reflection" on military problems last August. He finds himself in an embarrassing dilemma. This is all the more frue because the purest and hardest Gaullists intend to keep the army as their private preserve and to conserve the right to watch over everything that occurs there, through the eyes of Debré, Messmer, and Sanguinetti. The military problem thus emerges as a supplementary cause of friction within the presidential majority. In this context, the nomination of Bigeard appears more significant than the nomination of Bourges. The regime is going to attack on two fronts: psychological action, so dear to the hearts of the former paratroop colonel and the president, and repression. Bigeard will take his six-kilometer cross-country morning run with the enlisted men of this or that barracks. That's for demagogy. But we will also see his wrath. The press, which nearly unanimously rediscovered its Bonapartist turns of phrase to salute the coming to power of the "general who worked his way up from the ranks, " forgot rather quickly that Bigeard is no tenderfoot. The Vietnamese and the Algerians have longer memories than the journalists of l'Express. And in the military domain, the signatures on the Appeal of the 100 gave a very exact measure of what his brawny sweet temper meant. Poniatowski, the current interior minister, came up with worse than Marcellinesque epithets to stigmatize the French Communist party ("Fascist party") and the bleeding-heart judges. " Bigeard will manage to come up with worse than Messmerian epithets to stigmatize ultraleftist agitation. " He has already begun. Before he entered the government he denounced Alain Krivine as personally responsible for the agitation, taking up the theme of his friend Massu. There should be no illusion; the Pretorians have come into power with Bigeard. It is the revenge, hailed by the fascist paper Minute, of those who yearn for the old days of French Indochina and French Algeria. Hesitations of the bourgeois parties The hesitations and difficulties of the regime on the question of the army reflect those of the bourgeois parties. The UDR (Union des Démocrates pour la République - Union of Democrats for the Republic, the Gaullist organization) is divided between the traditional Gaullist-Jacobin conception of a strong army whip-
6 ping the enlisted men into shape (Michel Debré holds this position) and the technocratic conception of a well-oiled professional army. The latter solution is advocated by both Sanguinettis, the ex-secretary general of the UDR and the ex-chief of staff of the navy. Today, the adversaries are reconciled by the economic difficulties, which in no way allow for the establishment of a professional army. (According to the general staff of the armed forces, such an army would cost four times as much as an army of draftees.) A second polemic, of less immediate importance for us but decisive in the long run, deals with the type of armaments to acquire. Should the stress be put on conventional or nuclear weapons? The choice that has been made by Giscard, which was made public through his underwater cruise on a nuclear-powered missile-launching submarine, confirms the regime's commitment to a nuclear "deterrent" force and reduces to clownish antics the demonstrations through which Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber thought he could exert pressure "against the bomb, " The choice of submarines as the carriers of strategic nuclear-armed missiles also has important consequences. The land army now finds itself effectively deprived of the "noble weapon"; hence the bitterness of the chiefs of staff of the land forces and hence also the army's greater availability for so-called DQT tasks. (DQT stands for Défense Opérationnelle du Territoire, Operational Territorial Defense, a system of maintaining order that involves using the army along with the police in case of insurrection, whether or not linked to a "foreign Giscard's choice was essentially an "economic" one. He does not have the financial resources to develop a missile-launching submarine fleet, a flotilla of long-distance bombers, and the Albion plateau missile system all at the same time. This economic rationalization has political consequences, notably the acceleration of the transformation of the land forces into an "army of civil war. These economic difficulties of French capitalism go hand in hand with the rapprochement with NATO and the drift toward Atlanticism. General Stehlin, who was fired for having displayed too much enthusiasm for American combat aircraft, nevertheless must have well expressed the basis of presidential thought when he asserted that France, since it does not have the means to secure its own defense, would have to place itself under somebody else's umbrella. The Americans understood. And from the military point of view, West Europe is only an extension of the United States. The Gaullists, worshippers of the "national idea, " cried scandal, but Giscard did not say too much. French vessels participated in the
latest maneuvers of NATO naval forces off the Portuguese coast. Under Pompidou, they only followed at a distance during such maneuvers; there is a subtle difference. In short, Giscardianism in the military sphere may be summed up like this:
*A policy of combined demagogy and force toward the demands of the enlisted men;
*Preparation for boosting the prestige of career officers. That is for military personnel. As for the doctrine:
*Accelerated slide away from Gaullist positions toward the Atlantic fold;
* Maintenance of priority on nuclear arms, despite the financial difficulties. Position of the reformists The reformist workers organizations have had to determine their positions on the problem of the army as a function of varying pressures. First of all, in the directly political sphere, these parties begin from the current debates and discussions on the role of the army in Chile and Portugal and, more generally, on the function of the army under the capitalist system. Second, they have had to offer a response to the decisions and orientations by the regime. Third, they have had to respond to the movement of the draftees. The Socialist party is trying above all to play out its electoral hand. It is the ardent apostle of an army of "citizen-soldiers" (that is the title of the book by Charles Hernu) in the Jacobin tradition of 1792, as remodeled by Jaures in the concept of the "new army. " According to the SP, it is the task of the citizens to defend the fatherland; they can do it better than the monopolies, as is proven by the defeat of 1940. National defense is too important a thing to be consigned to specialists. The notion of the Fatherland, the Nation, is not questioned at all. The only distinction mentioned relates to the effectiveness of the defense of this fatherland and this nation: citizens in arms are more effective than the mercenaries of Capital. To base national defense on conscription in this manner requires that the draftees be agreeable. It is therefore necessary that they not feel too unhappy in uniform; hence a series of reforms are necessary. For the rest, the SP determines its position in terms of two objectives: *Doing nothing that could annoy its potential electoral clientele among the officers and noncommissioned officers. In the last presidential elections nearly half of all career military personnel voted for Mitterrand; these people are not potential CP voters. Thus, the Socialist party can hope to hold them, especially if it displays some caution in its appreciation of the movement of draftees. Some members of the left wing of the SP think they can turn to their benefit the operation the Portuguese SP carried out with a section of the Armed Forces Movement. This is not an entirely utopian prospect, and Military Security itself is uneasy about the advances the SP is making toward some career personnel. *Doing nothing that could compromise the authority within the army of a government of the left or of a government in which the SP would participate without the CP. In particular, the SP is determined to distinguish in the movement of draftees between what is the legitimate expression of legitimate demands and what is an intolerable challenging of military discipline. This has given rise to a rather complex moral theology. Charles Hernu, for example, testified in favor of the Draguignan demonstrators in the Marseilles military court, the following Monday, he severely disavowed the Karlsruhe demonstrators. A little is all right; too much is no good. The French Communist partyalso refuses to pose the problem of the army in class terms. At the time of the coup in Chile, the CP was hemmed in by the far left's attacks on its conceptions about the army; but now if is triumphantly exploiting the ambiguities of the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement: "We now see military democrats coming out of a colonial army formed under a fascist type of regime. Surely we will find many other such democrats in an army like the French army, with its democratic traditions. " (sic) The French CP also entertains illusions about the possibility of a "pure army" within the framework of the capitalist system. It refuses, of course, to analyze the army as ore of the pillars of the bourgeois state apparatus that has to be destroyed; instead, like the SP, it views the army as a field for electoral headhunting, the difference being that the CP is seeking the votes of the enlisted men and has consequently taken positions on the movement now under way that are generally more favorable than those of the Socialist party. The hierarchy and the nco's We have sometimes made the mistake of analyzing the positions of the military hierarchy in too one-sided a manner. Clique conflicts and interservice rivalries play a great role in the hierarchy and determine hostilities that, while they have a political basis, are nonetheless strongly mediated. Thus, how many unit commanders, even though very reaction-
7
FRANCE ary, have hesitated to hand over soldiers to Military Security, either out of the pleasure of "giving the cops a pain in the ass" or in order to get back at people who had poked their nose into their business a bit too much during the Algerian war. This is, of course, an ensemble of features that cannot be exploited by revolutionary Marxists; but their result is that the high command is not at all identical to the regime, even less to the present regime than to the Gaullist one. Old quarrels still fester, there are old accounts to settle, and silent struggles for influence run through the upper officer corps. To be sure, there should be no illusions about the position of these gentlemen in the event of clashes with the workers movement. In general, if they have differences with the government, it is because they believe the government to be too liberal! The NCOs, however, represent a corps in which a certain form of work is not excluded. Although a not inconsiderable proportion of the NCOs (especially in the land forces) are heading toward fascism at full speed, many of the NCOs are susceptible to joining in the struggles of the enlisted men. Some may even go further. The question of class origin is important. Some of them came out of worker families and joined the army to avoid unemployment (this is especially true of those in the navy and the air force); they do some small technical work to make a living, but they have no enthusiasm for the mili8 tary. It is probably thanks to them that Mitterrand's vote was so high among career personnel. The ranks But the decisive thing for us is the political evolution of the ranks of the armed forces. This has been a very differentiated evolution. In their great majority, the ranks do not see any "use" in military service. The country has no potential enemy, and under these conditions, why is it necessary to put up with a year of harassment in a barracks far away from home? This feeling of uselessness is unanimous. From the political standpoint it is obviously ambiguous. A certain number of those who share it would not feel inconvenienced at all (quite the opposite) in a professional army. But it is the common basis of the feeling of having "had enough. " Today, this unanimous sentiment has not been developed politically. And how could it be otherwise? The youth in uniform are the same as the youth in the high schools, in the factories, or on the farms. Many of them are strongly marked by ruling ideology and conformism, and this can be seen in discussions with them. What counts in life, they say, is a career, professional success, home, family, and children. But even those who are not in the workers move-
ment, who have scarcely ever heard of strikes or are suspicious of them, become enraged when someone talks to them about military service. "It's lost time." "Learning how to lie around. " And so on. This "had enough" sentiment makes it easy to unite the ranks around the most militant elements, around those who have gone through the struggles in the schools, the workers strikes, and the peasant mobilizations of these past years. It is a minimum basis for politicization. It is also remarkable how the social-melting-pot function that the bourgeoisie has assigned to the army ("you have to go there to get to know youth of different backgrounds ") is now completely working against the bourgeoisie itself. Crystallization takes place rather easily around the most militant elements, provided, of course, that they know how to act. The shift in the social composition of the far left is not unimportant in this process. The revolutionary student, who had a draft deferment and is often "buried" in an office, does not have a great audience. But the revolutionary worker militant quite naturally continues his militant mass work in his military company. A quite new phenomenon is the rejection of passivity on a mass scale. People no longer agree to being stuck between parentheses for one year; they no longer consider that it is something they have to do. It is this rejection of resignation that determines the new possibilities for intervention and politicization in this milieu. Even those who for an initial period fight the army on a purely individual basis learn solidarity very rapidly in the struggle. They quickly come to understand what repression is, and beginning from that, what the character of the regime is. What is changing is the age-old feeling of passivity, the idea that there is nothing that can be done against the army except back down. The success achieved by the demonstrators in Draguignan and Karlsruhe shows that it is possible to struggle and win, even in the army. The movement very often crystallizes around material questions (wages, leaves) before challenging the dogma of the necessity of national defense, for example. At the beginning, it is often a simple coming to consciousness through experience (among the lower NCOs, for example). But one would have to be a political illiterate to believe that the average consciousness of the ranks could spontaneously coincide with the understanding that revolutionary Marxists have of the army. It must not be overlooked that this means that the army has a small margin for maneuver, that for a time, here and there, the army's image can be polished up by granting some material improvements. But we think that a co-optation of the movement by the hierarchy is completely excluded. The hierarchy does not possess the means to grant satisfaction to the draftees' material demands, even if it wanted to do so. And the existence of a movement means rapid politicization and the development of consciousness about the general aspects of the problem. That is why we support moves toward the national organization of soldiers committees, why we warmly salute all the initiatives taken in this direction, like the coordination of the committees in Germany or the coordination meeting that was held in Paris in December. That is why we are ceaselessly popularizing the Appeal of the 100, the demonstrations at Draguignan and Karlsruhe: to give the movement a history, a collective consciousness, and beginning from that, a greater solidarity. Account must also be taken of the negative fact that the movement has a tendency to "specialize" on the military problem without making any analysis of the general political situation. This is one of its greatest weaknesses at present. For example, some barracks committees are on the point of making mistakes because they judge the general radicalization too much in terms of the climate in the barracks; they consequently propose, for example, to immediately move to a much heightened level of confrontation with the forces of repression - things like occupation and self-defense of military bases. Sometimes they leave themselves open to discouragement of their purely local analysis. The linkup with the workers movement appears absolutely decisive for us. Under the present conditions of the weakness of the movement, it must be assured of some minimum support from the workers organizations. The movement is not immune to rightist temptations (like taking up only the "corporatist" demands of the draftees). Nor is the movement free of ultraleftist temptations. Under the present circumstances, armed minority clashes are not excluded in certain barracks (the rifles are never far away, but it is clear that such events would have catastrophic consequences for everyone and that they would absolutely not be understood. The mass criterion of what actions should be engaged in appears as an essential criterion for pressing the movement forward and for assuring solidarity in face of repression. We are consequently fighting against the tendency of some militants to limit the political consciousness of the soldiers committees purely to the problem of the army, not only because of the prospect of the reintegration of militants into civilian trade-union and political organizations, but also from the standpoint of the interests of work in the army itself. Many difficulties arise from the fact that the reformists are not fulfilling their responsibilities within the army and are not doing the minimum organizational work there that they carry out in other milieus.
FRANCE Thus, when the revolutionaries propose an organizational structure or a possibility of struggle, everybody's disparate inclinations tend to seek an outlet through this one opening. Some people come simply to discuss, others, with a viewpoint that is strictly "corporatist" at the outset, come in order to win more frequent leaves; others come to pose directly political questions at a high level. The "soldiers committee" thus plays the role of a circle of politicization, an embryo of a trade union, and an action committee, all at the same time. How to work out a general orientation for such a multifaceted, flourishing movement? That is the problem posed for revolutionary militants. Even in the high-school movement, the reformists and other political forces are present. In the army, these organizations do not do anything, even though they take positions from the outside. How many comrades have had militants of the CP and the SP come to them to ask advice, to ask for a structure to discuss what should be done! In the workers movement, and even in the student movement, our intervention is worked out partly as a function of the perspectives of other currents of the workers movement, and that helps to construct an intervention. In the army, the comrades are often alone in their political analyses. A first temptation to avoid is "military corporatism." A one-year term of service is a short time. Neverthe less, it is sufficient for forging a specific mentality that risks restricting the challenging of the army to the question of the organization of military service as it is at the present time, without broaching the question of the role of the army during an insurrection, without broaching the problems of rejecting orders during an intervention against strikers, without posing the question of workers militias, etc. It is absolutely necessary for these problems to be posed in liaison with precise references to the struggles of the working class. It is absolutely necessary that the positions be clear in regard to the rejection of the professional army. A second temptation to avoid is sectarianism, which would consist of refusing to take into consideration the legitimate demands proper to the army itself (pay, leaves) under the pretext that these demands are politically ambiguous. It is necessary to politically advance the consciousness of the members of a soldiers committee; but at the same time it is necessary to refuse to do anything that could cut the committee off from the masses of enlisted men, anything that could make the committee appear as a church. The framework of the demands of the Appeal of the 100 is still useful for this, for it naturally makes the link between the demands spontaneously felt by the great mass of enlisted men and the demands that fall within a political logic (like dissolution of the Military Security and the military tribu-
10 nals). The link is natural because it is legitimate to fight against the obstacles and repression that these struggles entail. As for the forms of organization, new prospects have recently been opened up by the public positions taken by the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail - French Democratic Confederation of Labor, the country's second-largest trade-union federation). The CFDT is calling for the building of a soldiers trade union. Obviously, one must be wary of demagogy, of the declarations of neverapplied principles we are used to hearing from the CFDT. But it remains the case that an important workers organization has publicly taken a position: The idea of a trade union for soldiers thus takes on greater credibility and can be advanced in a form that is not simply propagandistic. We are thus in a transitional phase in which the barracks committees are beginning to pose the question of a soldiers trade union affiliated to the workers federations. The solution also (and essentially) depends on the debates and discussions within the workers movement and on the position taken by the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail - General Confederation of Labor, the largest trade-union federation, dominated by the CP), which has been in no hurry to seize the handle extended by the CFDT. There is no question of constructing a trade-union organization that would not be recognized by the workers confederations. We are not in favor of building independent red unions within the working class; still less in the On the other hand, we are in favor of a trade-union organization that would not refrain from speaking politically about the army, that would not refrain from denouncing the strikebreaking army, the colonial army, the army of civil war. Thus, in our minds it would be a trade-union organization that would necessarily have at least a clandestine aspect to it, even though it may be more or less tolerated at certain points depending on the relationship of forces. There is also no question of failing to respond within a trade-union framework to the demands referred to above as "corporatist" or of going to negotiate with the "regimental priest, " as the enlisted men justifiably call him. All this means that the trade union of soldiers is not yet immediately on the agenda and that for a certain period the building of committees in the barracks and on a national scale will continue to predominate. Thus, today we will fight for the following orientation:
*Strengthen the committees, both numerically and politically, with the perspective of eventually constructing a soldiers trade union.
*Strengthen the links between the struggles of the enlisted men and the struggles of the working class.
*Preserve and strengthen the mass character of the movement.