PDF-Version: Le Prolétaire – Hey, Charlie, easy now!

In its issue of October 22nd, Charlie-Hebdo claims to “criticise in depth” the “little bastards“, authors of the leaflet la Guerre Sociale who we dismantled in our n°322 infantile anti-anti-fascism. But as you might expect, the “background”, from which Charlie-Hebdo‘s big headlines emerge, is very different from ours. And if their apparent target is an effectively debilitating “ultra-left”, their real target is the position of revolutionary communism. So we have to pull them down a little bit.

Combine, combine, and something will always be left. The “ultra-left” has a long history of trying to create confusion between its positions and ours, in which it is strongly aided by all those who are targeting us through it. It is amusing to see Charlie bring forth the most stupid slanders against Bordiga propagated by both the Stalinists and the OCI[2], try to ridicule him with one sentence quoted out of context, and describe our criticism of democratic antifascism as “ultra-left”, which it states got “a lot of interest in the past [in the 1920s] and […] still has some apparently…”. If a Charlie finds his kids there, he’s lucky[3]! The only clear thing is that Manchette, who signed the article, has been reading, and that he is using that to confuse everything.

Likewise, and on the pretext that la Guerre Sociale approvingly cites Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, he sneakily evades any serious discussion of the Jewish question and the extermination of Jews, cites nothing of Auschwitz… other than one sentence isolated from its context, and equates our position, which explains this extermination, with that of people who deny its reality. He looks well when he ironises the pseudo-scientific method of the Faurissonnists!…

One of the objectives of Auschwitz… was to demolish the idealist vision of democrats for whom it is racism, a free passion, gratuitous and demonic, that caused the murder of Jews, and to show on the contrary that this murder required a determinist explanation of history. That is why the text provokes such an outcry, from Vidal-Naquet to Manchette, from Esprit to Charlie-Hebdo. Historical determinism? What horror! We want man to be free; we want ideology to be free, ours like that of our enemies, we want it to be the primary cause of the very blows that strike us.

We other neo-idealists want the “contemporary society of abundance” (when a third of humanity is starving to death and even in the USA there are 40 million “official” poor people, this simple expression is enough to situate the situationists!) to be the key to fascism, understood as its “rudimentary prototype“. We want society to have become “entirely spectacular (that is, entirely ideological)“; that is, we do not want to accept historical determinism or objective laws of the capitalist economy. We decree that “criticism of ideology has become the central question of society…“, of a society that is no longer determined materially but only by ideology, and no longer knows the class struggle but only ideological confrontations.

Certainly, “modern revolutionary criticism” is more subtle than classical idealism: it is even able to look for justification in Engels (who can’t do anything about it!). And it is ready to accept many things… for yesterday, provided that it is conceded that, like Sganarelle, “we have changed all that“. It is ready to admit that our current was right yesterday to see “in antifascism a frontism, by which the proletariat abandoned its own goals to support bourgeois democracy” and to have “revealed the secret of antifascist politics which, to prevent the dictatorship wants to strengthen the state“, etc. It is ready to take a hat off to our past so that it can call us fossils.

Because all this is outdated. Since when? How? Why? A mystery. It is affirmed, and it is laughed at.

For Manchette, it is a joke to speak today of “a sacred anti-fascist union […] which drives the proletarians back behind their counter-revolutionary organisations and reunites the antagonistic classes in defending bourgeois democracy“. According to him, “the only effectively real consensus [is] that of the various leaders who marched on television in general hilarity…“. And he claims that if the state and its henchmen pull out the “defense of the republic” trick, “then most people will burst out laughing...”. Very simple.

These good apostles should open their eyes. For if, indeed, the bourgeoisie and its lackeys have more difficulty in mobilising the proletarians, their ability to limit them is still very real. It is only necessary to see the workers in Lorraine defending “the French steel industry” against German ore. To see workers in shipyards or arsenals defending the “French navy”. To hear the SEITA[6] guys scream “smoke French”! It is necessary to acknowledge the impact that all social-chauvinist, social-racist, social-imperialist, and social-cop propaganda still has today on the people who defend the national economy and the bourgeois order. It is necessary to see the difficulty, for example, in setting up and organising a real and active movement of solidarity with over-exploited and over-oppressed immigrant workers, and the ease with which anyone can be made to say and do anything on the pretext of anti-semitism and the fascist threat.

“Most people will burst out laughing…“? Seriously! They don’t laugh at all. They declaim, they drool, they are already mobilising to defend the republican order, democratic and civilised. They are already rushing to strengthen the guardian of this order, the bourgeois state. This does not prevent Manchette, who nevertheless sees the state preparing to replace plastic bullets with “real bullets“, from affirming: “During this time the modern state, despite its rich ideological [!] panoply, is shaken everywhere…“. Think of Cohn-Bendit, another child of the situationists, claiming that in 1968 “there was no longer any power” (see Programme Communiste No. 43-44). Hey, Charlie, it’s not myopia anymore, it’s blindness!

Charl-Illusion

What is the purpose of all this nonsense, these “everything is spectacle“, “everything is ideology“, “the state is shaken“, “all we have to do is laugh about it…“, etc.? Would these jokers think they were thus “criticising democracy“? The infantile anti-anti-fascists, on the other hand, at least feel where the enemy is, even if they fight it so clumsily that they end up reinforcing it. The epigones of situationism move the whole social struggle from the real terrain to ideology and thus contribute to obstructing the real recovery of the revolutionary movement. They fight as best they can against the rebirth of a broad class movement of the proletariat oriented on its own positions.

If they can make fun of the “Leninist stupidity” of a group (regardless of which one) that “rejoiced in recruiting militants“, it is because nothing is further from their intentions than “militancy”. Even better, they claim that there is no need to be militant, but simply to make ideological criticism to undermine the consensus and lead “people” (the classes, not known…) to laugh at the power of the bourgeoisie that is crushing them. Their “ideological criticism“, which is nothing more than hollow verbiage, contributes to disorient and disorganise those who really want to fight against capitalism and the bourgeois state.

We have never denied the importance of ideology and ideological struggle, but they must be linked dialectically to social relations and class struggles. Our ideological struggle aims to destroy the opponent’s ideological weapons, and to give the proletarians the ideological, theoretical and political weapons they need to lead and organise their real struggles. We must defend these weapons against everyone, and also against the political clowns. Even those who laugh.

Source: Le Prolétaire n° 324, 1980

[1] French: Charlie-méli-mélo, a phonetic wordplay on Charlie-Hebdo

[2] OCI: The “Organisation Communiste Internationaliste” was a Trotskyist political party in France. Its successor is the “Internationalist Communist Current” (not to be confused with the “International Communist Current”) of the “Workers Party”, since 2008 the “Independent Workers’ Party”.

[3] Le Prolétaire uses the French expression “retrouver ses petits”, literally to “find one’s kids”, which wants to say that chaos or disorder looms over the one searching.

[4] French: Charl’idéalo, see above.

[5] French: Charlie-miro, see above.

[6] Former French state-owned tobacco monopoly. It merged in 1999 with its Spanish equivalent, Tabacalera, to form Altadis. This company was acquired by the British tobacco giant Imperial Tobacco (now Imperial Brands) in 2008.