France is once again a country of protests, strikes and growing popular anger. Young people are mobilizing against deteriorating schools and an increasingly uncertain future, while workers confront austerity, rising living costs and attacks on public services.
The French state finds enormous resources for military expenditure, yet workers and their families are told that sacrifices are unavoidable.
This absence is particularly striking in France. The country of the Paris Commune, the great workers' strikes and May 1968 possesses one of Europe's richest revolutionary traditions. For decades, the French Communist Party (PCF) was a formidable political force, with deep roots in factories, trade unions and working-class neighborhoods. How did a party with such a history end up abandoning the revolutionary principles that once distinguished it from social democracy?
The answer lies in a long process of ideological retreat. In 1976, the PCF formally abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat, a fundamental concept of Marxist theory concerning the conquest and exercise of political power by the working class. Its adoption of the opportunist trend of Eurocommunism, its gradual distancing from the October Socialist Revolution and its increasing reliance on parliamentary alliances marked a decisive turn toward reformism. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalist power was progressively replaced by the pursuit of governmental participation and reforms within the existing system.
This was not simply a matter of theoretical declarations. The PCF joined Socialist-led governments under François Mitterrand and later Lionel Jospin. In 1999, while NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the party condemned the aggression but remained in the French government that supported the military operation. Few episodes better illustrate the contradictions of trying to oppose imperialist policy while participating in the administration of an imperialist state.
The same political orientation has persisted through successive electoral arrangements with the Socialist Party and, more recently, Jean-Luc Mélenchon's political forces. The New Popular Front of 2024 was another expression of a strategy that increasingly treats parliamentary combinations and the prospect of a more progressive government as the answer to France's social and political crisis.
But replacing one bourgeois government with another does not change the class that holds power. Nor does a reformist program, however radical its language, constitute a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. The fundamental issue is not whether communists should fight for reforms or cooperate tactically with other forces. It is whether such struggles serve an independent strategy for workers' power or become ends in themselves.
Here lies the significance of the present mobilizations. Students protesting teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating educational facilities are confronting the consequences of political choices made in the interests of capital. Workers resisting austerity and declining living standards confront the same system. Yet indignation against particular government policies, even when expressed through mass demonstrations and strikes, does not automatically develop into socialist consciousness.
Lenin understood this distinction. In What Is To Be Done? (1902), he insisted that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” The task of a revolutionary party is not merely to support workers' immediate demands, but to connect their daily struggles with the necessity of overthrowing capitalist class power. Without such political leadership, even powerful movements can be exhausted, diverted into parliamentary expectations or confined to temporary concessions.
This is why the historical evolution of the PCF matters today. The consequences of revisionism cannot be measured only in lost votes or parliamentary seats. They are also visible in the weakening of an independent revolutionary perspective within the French working-class movement. A party may retain its communist name, symbols and historical references while pursuing a strategy that no longer challenges the foundations of bourgeois rule.
Of course, France is not without sincere communists, militant organizations or workers committed to revolutionary politics. The communist flags visible in the demonstrations themselves testify to the continued presence of revolutionary traditions and political potential. Yet flags alone cannot provide political direction. Without a strong Marxist-Leninist vanguard party, that potential remains fragmented and unable to develop into an organized revolutionary force.
And this is the central contradiction. France has fighting workers, rebellious youth and a society marked by sharpening class antagonisms. It also has a Communist Party whose long retreat into reformism has left a profound political vacuum. What is urgently needed is not another electoral coalition promising to administer capitalism more humanely, but the strengthening and rebuilding of a revolutionary communist force, independent of bourgeois politics, with deep roots among workers and youth.
The French people are demonstrating that they have not forgotten how to fight. But courage, militancy and mass participation, indispensable as they are, cannot substitute for revolutionary organization and leadership. The task facing French communists is to overcome decades of revisionist retreat and build a genuine Marxist-Leninist vanguard capable of turning resistance into a conscious struggle for workers' power.
France does not lack the forces of struggle. It lacks the revolutionary Communist Party capable of leading them toward the overthrow of the exploitative capitalist system, with the prospect of socialism-communism.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.