Workers against concessions

I posted this review at a site which actually sold subscriptions to "Lutte Ouvrière", a French far left bi-weekly. I encountered the LO and Spark in France about 25 years ago...long story!

Lutte Ouvrière (“Workers´ Struggle”) is the magazine of a French Communist organization of Trotskyist persuasion, officially known as Union Communiste. Usually, the organization is also called Lutte Ouvrière or the LO, since they use this name when standing in elections.

I don´t have this particular issue of the magazine, but I do have at least 50 back issues of its companion, Lutte de Classe (“Class Struggle”), a magazine which used to be bilingual (French and English) and later trilingual (adding Spanish). Yes, I have almost everything and anything in my private archives back home!

I don´t know what the LO is doing these days, and I don´t particularly care, but traditionally, they were very different from other Trotskyist groups. Instead of chasing after students or joining middle class protests such as the gay movement or the Green movement, the LO concentrated on recruiting actual workers, setting up a cell structure at industrial plants or in large hospitals, etc. In this, Lutte Ouvrière resembled a very traditional Communist Party! They were also extremely secretive, and almost never mentioned the name of their leader in any context. I knew it was “Hardy”, but it didn´t know that was a pseudonym, his real name being Robert Barcia.  

In France, the LO was modestly successful and became one of the three largest far left organizations (of course, they were small by most other standards, usually ending up last in the presidential elections). In other countries, the LO strategy didn´t work at all, LO´s co-thinkers being effectively outflanked by run-of-the-mill leftists who *do* recruit on campus, join middle class protests, etc. Chances are you never heard of their American sympathizers, known as The Spark, who are buried somewhere in the Rust Belt. Wiki mentions them, but their old electoral front in Michigan, “Workers against Concessions”, isn´t mentioned anywhere on the web, surely a world record of some kind. I happen to have a T-shirt spouting its symbol, a shirt of surprisingly good quality, which must be something of a rarity these days!

One of the reasons why I like this site is that they are selling precisely the kind of obscure stuff I managed to procure through obscure PO boxes already 25 years ago, which both gives me the opportunity to expand my collection, or post some of the rarest reviews ever written...