DEFFERRE AND THE BUCKET OF MILK
By Pierre Frank
Who does not recall La Fontaine's fable about Perrette and the bucket of milk she was carrying to market? In her daydream she saw herself investing the proceeds in some eggs which she hatched out and sold, to reinvest in a pig, and so on until she ended up rich. But then she stumbled over a rock, "Goodbye, cow, calf, pig, chicksSee.
Who would have thought that the mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre, would illustrate this fable in life in French politics? Egged on by a brain trust headed by the publisher of the Paris weekly Express, which is fascinated by the American way of launching a presidential candidate, Defferre took a series of steps aimed at winning the biggest prize of all, It began with the mysterious "Candidate X."" This algebraic formula was filled in with the name of Defferre, He then sought the backing of a special congress of the Socialist party. Next came the support of the "clubs" --= these associations of technocrats flourishing under de Gaulle's Bonapartist regime. This would enable him to launch the formula of a "democratic socialist federation" to be approved by congresses of the Socialist party and the bourgeois MRP [Mouvement Républicain Popu= laire]. It all met its end in a ten-hour session where the Jesuits of the MRP and the Freemasons of the SFIO [Socialist party] opened up their bag of tricks.
The day after the downfall of Defferre's visionary "federation," some of the commentators, including those on the payroll of Le Monde [France's most serious daily newspaper], deplored the setback, attributing it to the maneuvers of Mollet, Lecanuet, eto, It is true that the maneuvers of these old dogs in politics are beyond. count; but in this case they didn't need them. The people dazzled-.>:. by advertising techniques simply failed to take into account the facts of life in French politics, thinking that a high-powered campaign would be sufficient to bowl over parties with deep roots in the country, particularly the Socialist party.
Some of them, no doubt, do not understand this and we will see new attempts at overriding the parties with a kind of Gaullism, But at the moment, the so-called "left" parties of France still face the problem of what to do about the presidential election now less than five months away.
_ Although Defferre has shown himself to be a very seedy=looking politician, the Socialist party is putting the maximum pressure on : him not to.give up his candidacy. For the Guy Mollet leadership, it . is out of the question to run a joint candidate with the French Com= munist party. And Mollet has no alternative to Defferre. It is
quite likely that Mollet himself thinks a defeat at the polls will do more harm to Defferre's position inside the SFIO than it will to the future of the SFIO as an electoral party.
The setback to Defferre's Operation Federation has suddenly revived all the hopes of the French Communist party leadership for a common candidate of the ‘left," for they are particularly anxious to avoid having to run a Communist candidate, fearing that the inevitable loss of votes will convert the election into a plebiscite for de Gaulle and aggravate tne deep uneasiness observable in the party ranks, The Communist party leadership is showing interest in a com~ mittee of artists and writers which amid general indifference a few months ago expressed its hope for a single candidate of the left,
It is not our intention, however, to follow in detail the corridor operations to be expected in the next two or three months. For years the labor leaders have worked in this way to the profit of de Gaulle, In the short period ahead things cannot be righted and the presidential campaign will again offer the spectacle of dispersed labor forces and a serious loss of votes.
At bottom this will prove to be another illusion of the ineffectiveness, of the illusory character of the solution offered by the leaderships of the traditional workers parties to Gaullism., Bourgeois democracy, whatever the adjective used to decorate it with (real, renovated, ete.), is not capable of arousing the working. . masses, of breaking through the resistance of the socialist leaders on even the very limited question of a’ candidate in the election, The united labo» front needed to engage in a serious struggle against Gaullism at present -- not in order to prepare for "after de Gaulle" -- can only be organized on the basis of a program that begins with the immediate needs of the masses, advances solutions that will in themselves point to the perspective of a new power and a new regime, the perspective of a Workers and Peasants Government that will open the road to the construction of a socialist society.
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