Nationwide protests on September 10 and 18 confirmed the depth of working class opposition to the Macron regime and its program of austerity and war. France is plunged into a historic budget crisis, with the fall of the Bayrou government, exploding military spending, and a rapid deterioration in living conditions. Hundreds of thousands of workers, youth and activists have expressed their anger through strikes and blockades of infrastructure.

The decisive question is: how can this anger be transformed into a conscious, organized force capable of breaking the power of the capitalist oligarchy? In a September 10 article “On the brink of collapse: the Fifth Republic in terminal crisis?”, the Morenoite group Révolution Permanente (RP) tries to answer this question. But far from offering a revolutionary orientation, RP tries to disorient the working class, hiding the real political tasks it faces behind the calls for a “general strike” without content or international perspective.

Preparing a general strike requires building rank-and-file committees in the working class, entirely outside the framework of the current political system, to wage the class struggle. Only such organizations can break the debilitating diktat of the union bureaucracies over the class struggle, link workers' struggles in France with those occurring internationally, and open a path for revolutionary struggle for workers' power and socialism.

In contrast, RP member Juan Chingo asserts: 'To turn the situation around and build a movement capable of confronting the regime, we will therefore have to build the strike from below by seeking to develop self-organization, to extend general assemblies beyond a narrow circle of militants, and to think of them as a place for democratic debate over the direction of the movement. So, while we must demand that our trade unions develop a serious battle plan, we cannot leave the struggle in the hands of union bureaucrats.”

This passage sums up RP's politics: verbally criticizing the union bureaucracy while refusing to call for a break with it. Behind rhetoric about “self-organization,” RP in reality tries to limit workers’ struggles to put pressure on the existing union bureaucracies. The “general strike” it proposes is confined to the national framework and conceived only as a lever for negotiating with the capitalist state, not for fighting for socialist revolution.

But the current crisis is not limited to France. It is European and international. National debts are exploding, NATO is intensifying war plans against Russia and China, and everywhere the bourgeoisie is preparing massive social attacks on the workers. In this context, limiting the struggle to demanding “battle plans” from the union bureaucracies is to condemn the working class to new defeats.

RP’s role in the 2023 fight against Macron’s pension cuts illustrates this fact. At the time, millions of workers wanted to block the economy and bring down Macron. But the Intersyndicale—the all-trade union alliance led by the social-democratic French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT)—strangled the movement. It refused to call lasting strikes and ultimately called them off completely.

RP now acknowledges this. Chingo writes: “In 2023, the pension battle was led from start to finish by an Intersyndicale that made its decisions in opaque meetings, with no respect for the aspirations of the rank-and-file, ultimately subordinating itself to the strategy of respectability advocated by the CFDT leadership. This weakness in self-organization prevented the deployment of forces that would have made it possible to build the movement's expansion.'

But while making this observation, the RP refuses to draw the necessary conclusion: workers had to break with the Intersyndicale and build independent rank-and-file committees in frontal opposition to the bureaucracy.

On the contrary, at the decisive moment in the 2023 struggle, Chingo asserted: “The situation is not revolutionary, I agree with that assessment. The development of the general strike and the development of the masses’ self-organization point to the same horizon: that of the development of a genuine counter-power to the power of the bourgeoisie.”

In other words, while workers wanted a direct confrontation with Macron, the RP denied the objectively revolutionary situation. Its perspective was not to encourage the masses on the path of a struggle for workers' power against the bourgeois state. Rather, it sought to establish a vague “counterpower” within the bourgeois regime, intended to put pressure on it.

RP wrote at the time: “The movement would benefit from reconnecting with the best of the Jacobin revolutionary tradition or, better yet, that of the [1871 Paris] Commune, in order to develop elements of such a democratic program, such as the creation of a single Assembly, both legislative and executive. ... All this would greatly help the mass movement to experiment with bourgeois representative democracy and develop an awareness of self-organization, which in my view is the only viable democratic perspective.'

Thus, RP proposed not a struggle for workers' power and socialism, but an “experiment” with bourgeois democracy, that is, recycling capitalist parliamentarism in pseudo-radical language.

RP intensified the confusion by claiming that workers should conclude from the Commune, the world's first workers’ state, that they must appreciate “bourgeois representative democracy.” This is the opposite of what the working class should conclude from the experience of the Paris Commune. It was massacred by the army of the “bourgeois representative” Third Republic in the Bloody Week of May, 21-28, 1871.

A relentless political offensive for workers’ power is the only way to avoid disaster in historical crises like those of 1871, and today. This is the key lesson that Marxists drew from the massacre of the Commune, helping prepare the Bolsheviks politically for the October Revolution in Russia. But Révolution Permanente, despite its name, is diametrically opposed to a Bolshevik political strategy.

RP maintains today the same petty-bourgeois orientation it had in 2023. Its talk of “self-organization” and “strikes from below” masks its refusal to confront the central issues: the nature of the capitalist state, the need to organize workers independently of union bureaucracies that are pillars of this system, and the necessity of an international revolutionary strategy.

Despite calls to “block everything,” RP consciously limits the struggle to the French national scale. But the current crisis cannot be resolved at the national level. The austerity plans dictated by the European Union, wars planned by NATO, and the banks’ financial speculation can only be fought through an international mobilization of the working class.

RP’s line, behind its “combative” phrases, remains nationalist, limited to calls to reform the moribund capitalist system. It aims to channel social anger into union bureaucracies or allied petty-bourgeois organizations, while carefully avoiding any call for the expropriation of capital or the taking of power by the workers.

The current crisis confronts the working class with two perspectives: either the bourgeoisie imposes a dictatorship to crush social opposition, or the workers build a revolutionary organization capable of overthrowing capitalism.

This means breaking with the union leaderships and their political allies, including RP. These leaderships are not “neutral” instruments that can be pressured to fight. They are integrated into the state, which finances them in order to maintain social order and stifle any real protest. Workers cannot ask them for a “battle plan.” They must take the organization of their struggles into their own hands.

The central task is to build independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, universities and working class neighborhoods to coordinate strikes and mobilizations outside the control of the bureaucracy. These committees must unite internationally within the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to prepare a global response to austerity and war.

Only on this basis can a revolutionary struggle against Macron, the EU and NATO develop. The political organization that must provide this leadership in France is not Révolution Permanente, which is hostile to any Trotskyist perspective, but the Socialist Equality Party, the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.