Workers World, Vol. 23, No. 22 (typo in pamphlet: No. 18)
May 13, 1981: The French election may not be a turning point in world history, but it does have tremendous political and social significance on a world scale.
The victory of the Left has thrown the bourgeois world into consternation. The panic on the French Bourse (stock market) is only one piece of evidence. It was, of course, expected that if the Left won the French bourgeoisie would react in the traditional manner with a flight of capital. This, however, is in reality small potatoes when compared to the more significant effects of the election victory.
Most of the commentators in the bourgeois camp dwell rather heavily on the changes in the diplomatic relationships flowing from the Left’s victory, especially as concerns the U.S. and NATO. Some already go to extremes. For instance, the well-known syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft says that “Europe lurched toward neutralism Sunday when [France] elected a new president. France dumped the most pro-American leader of the Fifth Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing” (Washington Post, May 12, 1981).
It is, of course, true that François Mitterand will put up a more neutralist stance. But this is merely a posture. For Mitterand, notwithstanding his socialist professions, is as dedicated toward advancing French imperialist interests as his predecessors, but only by a somewhat different method and route.
It is also speculated that West Germany and Britain are deeply concerned about Mitterand’s election vis-à-vis changes in their reciprocal diplomatic relations. But this, too, should be taken in a measured way and is not really counted on to be of much significance.
Where the Left victory in France is regarded with real apprehension and is greatly disturbing is I the highest echelons of the Reagan administration, among the leaders of the military-industrial complex, and in the sections of the ruling class which are tied to the Reaganite world perspective.
Why is this so? From an ideological point of view the Reaganite world perspective is geared toward a sharp and continuing swing to the right on a world scale and most importantly among the major countries of Western Europe.
In the view of the Reaganites the election in the U.S. last November was to have set off nothing less than a global period of dark reaction and chauvinism. This period was to recognize the supremacy of the Pentagon as the world leader in a new anti-communist crusade that would encompass a coordinated assault against not only the Soviet Union but the Third World, that is, the oppressed peoples of the world.
The election results in France, however, show that the Reaganite ideologues of blatant reaction are caught in a basic miscalculation.
What do the elections in France really show? Not that Mitterand is a fiery, revolutionary socialist or that the Socialist Party as a party has any hope of pushing through a socialist transformation of France. Nor is there any real apprehension that the coalition of Socialists and Communists, should it develop, would ipso facto pose a so-called communist danger, that is, a proletarian revolution.
But what the elections unquestionably disclose and reveal for the whole world to see is a new social trend in the heart of Europe. It is in fact a mass upsurge of workers and the petty bourgeoisie in rebellion against the reactionary Giscard regime. The calculations of Jesse Helms, Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan, the Wall Street Journal, and all the others are based on false hopes for their world perspective. The masses are moving in an entirely different direction. This is the real meaning of the election.
Is this really so? Let us first hear from the other side. It is nowhere better stated than in the same column by Joseph Kraft referred to above:
“France waxed fat during the seven-year rule of Giscard. Per capita income rose faster than in any other advanced country except Japan. With growth went undoubted social progress. Good roads, an excellent rail system, and modern telecommunications pulled even the most remote areas into the 20th century. A basic minimum salary was made available to agricultural workers. Bidonvilles—the tar paper shacks that used to house foreign laborers in every French city—disappeared. Almost alone among Western leaders, moreover, Giscard followed the Japanese example of systematically organizing the economy for competition in the international marketplace. He poured cold water on inefficient industries and fostered concentration among French firms in data processing, nuclear power, aerospace, and sophisticated materials.”
Giscard couldn’t have stated it any better. However, if all of this is true, why was he so unceremoniously thrown out? Kraft, like all others who represent the class interests of the bourgeoisie, is often prone to forget precisely that which is uppermost in their mind.
Thus Kraft conveniently omits what the Wall Street Journal in its analysis yesterday could not afford to leave out. And that is that the inflation rate in France during Giscard’s tenure rose to what the Wall Street Journal conservatively estimates at 14%. “And unemployment rose fourfold, to about 7% since Giscard’s election seven years ago”—conservative estimates, one should add.
Therein lies the basic fallacy in the entire program which the Reaganites have constructed not only for the U.S. but on a world scale. Kraft, in giving his alluring picture of Giscard’s seven-year reign, has stitched together two different cycles of capitalist development. One is the ending of a boom period and the other is a period of capitalist depression. Kraft obscures this.
The early 1970s were boom years for large parts of Europe and still somewhat so in the U.S.—all mostly the result of the export of inflationary dollars abroad in order to finance the Vietnam War. Then came the capitalist crisis, the continuing rearmament, double-digit inflation, and unemployment—the same kinds of ills which are afflicting the U.S.
The seven-year rule of Giscard, a quasi-Reaganite himself with a majority of supporters in parliament and a more or less free hand to deal with the capitalist economy as he saw fit, could do no better than end up with galloping inflation and pervasive unemployment.
The remedies that Giscard applied to stem the tide of capitalist economic decay, given French conditions, did not vary very much from what Margaret Thatcher is applying in Britain and what Reagan is now pushing through with galloping speed in the U.S.
Already the response to the reactionary Thatcher program is shown by the local elections in Britain, which have made very tasteless reading for the high command in the Reagan administration. For what the British local elections show is that the reactionary economic program is evoking a militant, working-class response and that the economic recipes of the Thatcher-Giscard-Reagan doctrines are based on a false assumption, the assumption that the masses will take cuts in their living standards lying down.
There is no possible way that the capitalist system can avoid arousing the millions of exploited from one end of the world to the other when it unleashes a reactionary onslaught against the working class.
It is not only in London and Paris, New York and Chicago, but also in the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa where resistance is growing and the world capitalist cycle of endemic inflation and skyrocketing costs of living as well as unemployment plague the masses. This is true even in so-called newly rich oil countries like Nigeria, which only today experienced a nationwide general strike closing down practically everything, including airports, with the support of pilots as well as controllers. Demands were raised which show how deep inflation cuts into the living standards of the people, such as a call for tripling the minimum wage.
The Reaganite program, which seeks to set back the gains made by the working class in the U.S. over half a century, is still in the stages of being implemented. The axe has not yet fully fallen on the broadest sections of the working class and the oppressed people. Yet resistance is already building up.
The demonstrations against the budget cuts in more than 100 central cities in the United States is only a beginning. The May 3 demonstrations were a singularly significant political development which, like the French election results, were wholly unanticipated not only by the Reaganites but by many circles in the progressive movement, some of which should have known better.
What the French election showed is that the future of capitalist reaction on a world scale is gloomy. The prospects for revolutionary working-class revival are great and indomitable.
Last updated: 11 May 2026