French Trotskyists revamp 1917 rhetoric

AFP ^ | 11/03/03 | AFP

[Pikamax]

French Trotskyists revamp 1917 rhetoric PARIS, Nov 2 (AFP) - France's Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) has announced it is moving away from old Soviet-style rhetoric, as a new opinion poll shows the extreme-left making significant ground on the mainstream political scene.

At its 15th party congress on Saturday, delegates of the Trotskyist party voted overwhelmingly to drop the Marxist tenet of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a move described as a "pleasant surprise" by one LCR member.

The "Stalinist reference had become too heavy a load," the delegate said.

The party also voted in favour of an alliance with the fellow Trotskyist Workers' Struggle party (LO).

LO leader Arlette Laguiller won 5.8 percent of the vote in this year's oresidential election, won by Jacques Chirac.

According to a poll published in Sunday's Journal du Dimanche newspaper, the two parties combined could do even better at the ballot box.

Nine percent of respondents said they had voted for the extreme left before and would do so again while a further 22 percent said they would consider voting for them for the first time.

The LCR party's new statutes, agreed by 85 percent of members on Saturday, call merely for "the building of a mass party which is anti-capitalist, feminist and ecologist, founded on the principle of the emancipation of the working class and all the oppressed and exploited," as the first step towards a classless society.

The change, dropping the reference to proletariat dictatorship, was necessary to bring the statutes in line with "the realities of today" said 'Olive', the party's operative in charge of drawing up the new statutes, who insisted the move was "not a radical change".

In another move away from old-style communist Cold War rhetoric, the party's central committee becomes the national directorate although the politburo retains its name.

The old statutes dated back to 1969. They were reviewed in 1974 when the party - which holds no seats in parliament - was reformed after being banned the previous year during the presidency of Georges Pompidou.

The more mainstream French Communist Party (PCF) dropped the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976.

[headsonpikes]

Jeez...I don't know....

'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' is one of the left's most amusing concepts.

[Iris7]

Interesting. I'll have to keep a closer eye on European Marxist - Leninist parties. In the M-L jargon the Trotskyist factions are distinguished by calling Stalin a "Rightist Deviationist"! They SAY they don't like what in the jargon is called "Democratic Centralism"!! (The style of government good old Uncle Joe Stalin is so famous for!!)

Trotsky was the boy who attracted all those fellows wearing smooth heavy waxed leather clothing. This clothing was fashionable within this group of fun loving lads because it could be wiped clean of blood easily. You know, those sweet boys who carried a suitcase full of German pistols for their work, since the German pistols were reliable compared to Russian ones, and a suitcase full because even the German pistols would stop working in a big execution job in some basement somewhere. Sweethearts.