The Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela and his threats to bomb Iran, and the strike movement in Minneapolis against its extrajudicial murders of US citizens in occupied cities, is relentlessly unmasking political tendencies. The outbreak of imperialist wars and class struggle is exposing the bankruptcy of the organizations that have predominated in what capitalist media promoted as the “left” for decades.
France Unbowed (LFI), the populist party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon that formed the New Popular Front (NFP) with the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), the Greens and the Pabloite New Anticapitalist Party (NPA), does not offer a revolutionary perspective for a struggle against imperialism. Ignoring the mobilisation of US workers in Minneapolis, LFI is aligning itself with French imperialism. It is backing attempts by Paris to find a new understanding with Washington, despite the explosive crisis in US-European relations provoked by Trump’s designs on Greenland.
Last week, when Macron refused to give the $1 billion Trump was demanding to participate in his peace council, which is supposed to administer the genocide in Gaza, Trump published WhatsApp messages that Macron had sent him. The Elysée presidential palace then confirmed that the texts from Macron were indeed authentic. In them, Macron applauded Trump’s foreign policy and begged to organize a meeting with Trump in Paris. Macron wrote:
“My friend, we are totally aligned in Syria. We can accomplish great things in Iran. I don’t understand what you’re doing in Greenland. Let’s try to build great things: (1) I can organize a G7 meeting after Davos in Paris on Thursday afternoon. I can invite the Ukrainians, the Danes, the Syrians, and the Russians to the margins. (2) Let’s have dinner together in Paris on Thursday before you return to the USA. Emmanuel.”
By publishing Macron’s sycophantic text, America’s fascist president demolished Paris’ pretensions to a foreign policy fundamentally different from his own. Ignoring the plundering of Venezuela, Macron endorsed Trump’s threats to bomb Iran and applauded his policy in Syria, a country whose president Trump had received in Washington before he launched a bloody offensive against the Kurds. And Macron, who has praised Israeli leaders and cracked down on pro-Gaza protests in France, is no opponent of genocide in Gaza.
Indeed, Paris, the French banks and the CAC-40 (French stock exchange) hope to plunder Venezuelan and Iranian oil and obtain a large share of the spoils of a redivision of the world that the imperialist powers are trying to carry out, despite the growing rivalries between them.
Indeed, Macron had also welcomed Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, writing on X: “The Venezuelan people are now rid of the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and can only rejoice.” Cynically trying to pass off as a liberation Trump’s unprovoked invasion of a country to plunder its oil, Macron added: “The coming transition must be peaceful, democratic and respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people.”
What was the LFI’s reaction to this revelation of Macron’s political criminality and cowardice? After Trump published Macron’s text message, LFI sent the leader of its faction in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, on public France Info television to defend Macron.
“Emmanuel Macron is absolutely right to refuse to join this Gaza Council,” Panot said. Attempting to portray the French government as a courageous opponent of Trump, she added: “Capitulating to Trump, giving in to Trump is useless. So we have to stand firm.”
Panot then set herself up as a defender of Macron’s honor. Taking offense at Trump’s publication of the private text messages Macron had sent Trump behind the backs of the French people, she added: “We do not accept that our country and the president, as hated as he is, are humiliated in this way internationally.”
On the content of Macron’s text message, however, Panot did not criticize his support for Trump’s wars of plunder. She only worried that Macron’s subservience to a US president who is hated across Europe would stoke social anger. She complained: “Emmanuel Macron seems to be continuing on a strategy where he thinks that by being sycophantic enough towards Donald Trump, Donald Trump could change his attitude.”
These comments expose LFI’s pro-imperialist class orientation. While LFI is endlessly denounced in the far-right or pro-Macron press, its role is above all determined by its populist hostility to the class struggle. The parties and union bureaucracies that LFI has gathered into the NFP aim to stifle or, if that is impossible, to channel the class struggle on the national stage, as workers saw with the union leaderships’ sellout of mass strikes against Macron’s overwhelmingly unpopular pension cuts in 2023.
Minneapolis workers are mobilising and striking against the unlawful executions of US citizens by ICE, Trump’s fascist anti-immigrant police. But LFI does not aim to mobilise workers in France against a hated president, against neocolonial wars and in solidarity with US workers. LFI defends Macron’s left flank, while Macron declares himself a “friend” of a fascist US president who is sending troops to occupy US cities and oppress the American population.
The decisive question posed to workers by the bankruptcy of LFI is how to fight imperialist war, fascism and the dictatorship of the capitalist oligarchy. A decisive question must be posed to workers and youth: the need to break the grip of the New Popular Front bureaucracies on the class struggle and unleash the energy of the immense workers’ opposition simmering in France and internationally.
This requires the independent mobilisation of workers from below and the building of rank-and-file action committees in the working class. These would serve to remove control of the organisation of struggles from the union bureaucracies, linked in France to the NFP. The mobilisation of the “yellow vests” has already shown in an embryonic way how such powerful social movements can be built independently of the bureaucracies.
It is now a question of building such a mobilisation in the working class, to coordinate a movement of strikes and social protests to stop the imperialist wars and social attacks on the working class and bring down the capitalist dictatorships in formation.
This raises the need for a reorientation of politically advanced layers of workers and youth on the basis of Permanent Revolution, the Trotskyist perspective advocated by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its French section, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste.
World imperialist war, fascism and genocide are not minor blemishes in an otherwise healthy capitalist system that needs to be refounded through trade union struggles in unity with bourgeois organisations like the French PS. They are the signs of a mortal crisis of capitalism, like the crimes of the Hitler regime at the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II. They call for a revolutionary strategy. Democracy and social rights can only be defended through an international struggle for workers’ power and socialist revolution.
The fact that Panot is covering the politically criminal discussions between Macron and Trump is a warning about the counterrevolutionary role of the NFP and all the organisations that have oriented to it and the necessity of building the ICFI as the revolutionary alternative for the working class.