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New International, January 1948

 

Notes of the Month

Leon Blum’s “Third Force”

 

From The New International, Vol. XIV No. 1, January 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Third Force. When Leon Blum – the reformist chief of the French Socialist Party, who for some reason or other continues to believe that he believes in socialism – appeared before the Chamber of Deputies as candidate for premier, he made a speech calling for the formation of a “third force,” which would oppose both de Gaulle and the Stalinists.

During the recent war we said that we stood for the “third camp,” which, we explained, meant that we gave no support either to the camp of Allied or to the camp of Axis imperialism, but represented the revolutionary interests of the working class against both rival groups of exploiters.

What concerns us is not the superficial resemblance in phrase but the enlightening difference in the content of the phrases, and the opportunity it presents to underline the meaning of the third-camp position.

For Leon Blum, the other two forces are reaction on the one hand (de Gaulle) and the revolutionary working class on the other (this is the light in which he sees the Stalinists, like all reformists). We do not have to reiterate here our view that the French Communist Party is capable only of parasitically feeding on the militancy of the workers whenever this jibes with Russian imperialist needs; that it uses the revolutionary working class only as a base of operations and a cat’s paw, ready to betray it as fast as Blum himself, though in a different interest; that the recent push of the Stalinists in Western Europe is from their side an expression of the inter-imperialist conflict between the rival Russian and American would-be empire builders, grafted on to the legitimate class struggle of the proletariat. Though he admits that the CP is only an agency of the Kremlin, Blum, as a fossilized reformist, cannot resist the opportunity to tar the rebellious militancy of the workers with the brush of Stalinist totalitarianism.

On the basis of this attempt to maintain the untenable status quo as against both capitalist reaction and proletarian revolt, Blum sets his “third force” between the two as a moderator of the forces that are inescapably tearing French society apart. Or rather, this is what he hoped to do – it was not even he but rather the Popular Republican Schuman who was elected.

The third camp of the anti-war socialists was the third camp of the working class against both rival groups of capitalists. The “third force” of Blum is the petty bourgeoisie vainly trying to hold the balance between working-class revolution and capitalist reaction. It is a dream of a new Popular Front without the Stalinists and against them. This “third force” tries hopelessly to wedge in as a compromise between force No. 1 and force No. 2. The socialist third camp stands outside of and fights both, on its own class feet.

It remains to add that in spite of his defeat for the premiership Blum has declared more than once in Le Populaire that the Schuman government has indeed become his “government of the third force,” even though it was elected with Gaullist votes. Here is the old spectacle of social-democrats continuing to hold on to the coattails of the “defenders” of bourgeois democracy even us under their eyes the latter accommodate themselves to Bonapartist reaction. The position of the third camp was never more necessary than in France today.

 
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