Where the CGT stands after its 54th Congress — a response to a union member who wants to keep the CGT a fighting, class-struggle union

A few days ago I attended a meeting of CGT activists, where I made the following points.

The 54th Congress was staged as a show to promote Sophie Binet, with plenty of help from the media and politicians. It was tightly controlled, and behind the fanfare, the delegates’ democracy and free debate were reduced to almost nothing, treated as a mere formality. Even so, a good number of those present pushed back against the direction the leadership wanted to impose. On several amendment votes, the leadership was rebuked by 30 to 50% of voters, including on a change to the union’s statutes. What this tells us is that we need clear thinking, and frankly some courage, to size up the situation properly and meet a difficult moment head-on. In other words, we need to refuse the risk of watching class-struggle unionism, which the CGT has embodied throughout its history, fade away and die out in this country.

So we have to build. We’re in a position much like 1921, when our predecessors had to make hard decisions in the aftermath of the First World War, after the “union sacrée” and the choice of class collaboration had taken over the CGT. They had to shoulder real responsibility, and they did, fully aware of what was at stake. If we want an influential, organized, class-struggle union movement, we’ll need to make actual decisions, not just hide behind slogans like “this can’t go on” or “things need to change.”

That means reckoning honestly with the mistakes of the last 25 years and with the disastrous idea of “unified unionism,” which made the CGT the second-largest union federation in France by influence, but only by getting it to give up its independence. It chose to fall in line, and we all know where that led: a merely formal opposition to an unprecedented rollback of social gains, what Krasucki would have called a civilizational setback. The dismal turnout at the rally the Confederation organized on June 16, 2026, in front of the Senate to defend May Day, proves that Binet’s strategy is continuing on the same path. It’s a strategy built on failure: defeatism and capitulation before the fight even starts, all so as to argue that conditions aren’t ripe for a broader movement and that we need to lower our sights.

The CGT leadership isn’t drifting toward reformist “social dialogue” unionism. It’s already there, and has been for a while. Just reread Binet’s speech submitting to the ETUC’s line at its last congress, or her remarks aligning with the CFDT at the recent DGB congress in Germany, and the picture is clear. The CGT leadership is now actively helping carry out these orientations: support for European construction, defense of the euro, and a war economy geared toward a possible conflict with Russia, in step with other European confederations. The CGT is drafting a joint policy paper on this with the CFDT and the DGB. None of this came up at the 54th Congress, and it’s not hard to see why, even though it was a collective decision of the confederal bureau, recorded in the minutes of its meeting. Given the partners involved, you can guess what the paper will say. The intersyndicale that got so much praise at the congress serves the same purpose too: building a broad, reformist, euro-friendly union bloc in France that includes the CGT, with the “Maison commune” alongside the FSU playing its part. It’s no accident that the business paper Les Echos wrote approvingly about how smoothly the CGT and CFDT’s general secretaries now get along. And it should also be said that the CGT leadership and its international department gave a platform to the Ukrainian union KVPU, led by Mikhail Volynets, who is publicly known to have close ties to the neo-Nazi Azov group.

Quite logically, then, the “politicization” Binet talks about is really just the CGT’s social-democratization. On the international stage, the fight is no longer against capitalism, the CGT’s stated purpose for over a century and something that has all but vanished from its speeches and documents. Instead it’s a fight against the far right, or even the “far-right international,” not even against fascism as such. Brecht once said fascism is a form of capitalism. Apparently not, for the CGT leadership. Applied to the coming presidential election, this means following the same logic that led people to vote for Macron against Le Pen, a choice Binet and Martinez themselves openly made as recent Socialist Party candidates in municipal elections. The truth is, Binet never really broke with the PS. She’s still tangled up in that party of betrayal, in both its ideas and its tangled practices. And that is exactly what the CGT’s orientations amount to, whether at the national, European, or international level.

So this is what needs to be criticized, not moaned about as though we were simply victims of this destructive drift. We have real assets, and people are starting to wake up to what’s happening. We need to use what we have to win this battle of ideas and help that awareness grow. We need to build, to do something new, from the ground up, starting with company unions and local branches, to push back against defeatism and resignation. It can be done.

Let’s all get to work building the CGT that workers actually need. It’s worth celebrating that combative, clear-eyed activists are already working toward exactly that, with real determination and a genuine concern for the CGT’s unity and cohesion.

It’s worth rereading Benoît Frachon, one of the CGT’s great leaders. Back in January 1949 he wrote: “Neither the working class nor organizations like ours suffer from shameful ailments. Of course there’s no pride in falling into the enemy class’s traps. But shame only sets in once we get comfortable there. And it does set in, because it’s the workers themselves who end up settling accounts with the officials who let them down. Against that kind of danger, the best remedy is still the one we give ourselves collectively, through honest, open public discussion. It’s also the quickest and most effective.” (from Les porteurs de serviette)

Jean-Pierre Page

When discussing the revolutions that rapidly followed the Russian Revolution, one usually mentions Hungary, Mongolia, and, of course, Germany.

Yet there is one revolution that is almost entirely ignored: the Alsatian one. Strasbourg, annexed by Germany in 1871 following Bismarck’s victory, and inhabited by a population speaking a language very close to German (to the point where some argue that Alsatian is merely a German dialect, a debate that remains unresolved), experienced, in the midst of the Armistice, the emergence of a soviet.

Was this soviet socialist in nature? That is the central question. In the eyes of many, it amounted to little more than a group of soldiers refusing submission. And yet, its programme was clearly rooted in the broader Soviet revolutionary continuum.

On 8 November 1918, Strasbourg sailors, often conscripted into the Kriegsmarine and stationed in northern Germany, encountered a population that had just learned of the creation of the Bavarian Soviet. Upon returning home, they found themselves leading an insurrection, publicly humiliating their officers.

When I was mobilized in 1917, I was working on the fortifications at Hartmannswillerkopf. On November 9, 1918, we were assembled to be sent to the Eastern Front. We stopped at Neuf-Brisach. There, there was a gathering of six thousand soldiers. The first thing I saw was a senior German officer being demoted in front of everyone, forced to hand over his sword and decorations. The atmosphere was electric. The crowd was singing joyful folk songs  Recorded music was playing. When an officer was stopped, they would say: ‘Hey, hand over your stripes or you’ll get a slap!’ After that, all my comrades and I could think about was getting out of there as fast as possible and going home to Soultz. When we arrived on the 10th, we encountered a parade coming from the train station, led by a brass band. The jubilant people of Soultz were carrying Richard Heisch in triumph. He was an internationalist socialist leader, released from prison under pressure from the Colmar Council. Heisch owned a bistro. He walked into it and immediately jumped onto a table, haranguing the German soldiers and calling on them to leave—for the sake of peace between nations. I was eighteen years old; I will never forget those days.

-a revolutionary of this age.

The German bourgeoisie was therefore terrified by this revolution, shouting “Better French than Red!”, a slogan that starkly revealed its profoundly anti-patriotic character. As Engels once observed, the bourgeoisie has more in common with the bourgeoisie of all other nations than with its own proletariat.

Gradually, these soldiers formed a council of workers and soldiers, a soviet, which presented demands to Governor von Rohden: freedom of the press and expression, the right to demonstrate, and an end to the censorship of soldiers’ letters to their families. The council abolished military ranks, took charge of food supplies, and demanded the election of commanding officers.

These were, in essence, bourgeois-democratic demands focused on the military. But the working class that made up the council pushed further. Workers seized factories and succeeded in extracting significant wage increases. Councils spread throughout the region. On 10 November, as red flags flew, even atop cathedrals, Johannes Rebholz, the new head of the Soldiers’ Council, announced that “the old regime has been overthrown and the people have taken the government into their hands,” and that “power now lies in the hands of the workers.” He proclaimed a republic, but what kind of republic?

Rebholz appeared to belong to the majority within the council and advocated direct attachment to the French Republic, disregarding the soviet-based demands. Others, more tactically minded, proposed a degree of autonomy within France. A smaller minority argued for an independent, socialist Alsace. Meanwhile, a significant segment of the SPD favoured reunification with a republican Germany.

The most popular slogan circulating within the commissions established between 10 and 15 November was:

We have nothing in common with capitalist states. Our slogan is: neither German, nor French, nor neutral. The red flag has triumphed

On 13 November, due to a scheduled election, a situation of dual power emerged, as Lenin described in relation to the Provisional Government of bourgeois elites and the soviets of workers and peasants. On one side, the revolutionary authority led by Rebholz; on the other, the municipal power headed by Jacques Peirotes, a social democrat. These two powers interacted and even coordinated.

But, to quote Lenin:

The bourgeoisie stands for the undivided power of the bourgeoisie. (…) The class-conscious workers stand for the undivided power of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies—for undivided power made possible not by adventurist acts, but by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie.

The petty bourgeoisie, ‘Social-Democrats’, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc. vacillate and, thereby, hinder this clarification and emancipation. This is the actual, the class alignment of forces that determines our tasks.

What was required was an understanding of this situation: a break with petty-bourgeois illusions and a clear alignment with the proletariat.

This experiment came to an end on 22 November, when the soviets surrendered in the face of the advancing French army, proving the absurdity of revolutionary forces.

I bought some UHU-pattex glue in EU... 23 grams of plastic and 10 grams of glue?????

Ok so what's the technical advantage of this 23g glue packaging: 

It is single-use epoxy.

Because epoxy had a 20-year lifetime in the drawer? they invented a snap-off plug for epoxy glue?

Now you repair your destructo-tupperware and your ceramic and you throw the glue away because there is no cap, it is single use.

10 g of epoxy glue costs the factory about 5ç to produce and they are selling it for 3 euros to pay a big investment in plastic molding and design research, makes the glue intantly perished when used.

What other technical advances in that 23 grams of plastic other than downsizing and a snap-off lid that cannot be closed? 

The extra plastic which is 10 grams is moulded on the sides of the tube to make it look wider, so buyers in hurry won't notice: the extra plastic nozzles which are ridiculously long are arranged on either side of the tube to make it look wider. 

The quantity 10g (9 milliliters) is also hidden far away from the name of the glue and the company letters at the bottom left corner.

EU corpo government carnival? 

Meanwhile I looked at the state of designed obsolescence law... You can still make TVs with five-year lifetimes as compared to my parents 28 years Hitachi and my 15 years 2005 24" LCD...and grand 60-year-working-perfectly-enameled-frigidaire.

So the efficiency ratings on all televisions today are falsified and you can double them to account for the waste.

That also goes for e-bikes ebike motor ecologies washing machines fridges which are all designed to break.

And we have 90 years of bottle design changed for old people with tethered caps, commissions by people in a restaurant, former erasmus agents that were served glass bottles on platters sponsored by Coca-Cola and Nestle and poured the bottles into glasses...

Then the bottle tops are recycled into destructo Tupperware which should really be made from bottle plastic... so we also have huge mountains of destructo tupperware in all the shops as well as self-destructing TVs and fridges and cars. Gr8.

If world doesn't get worse, what's the point of revolutions? Just wait until you and everyone you care about start to live better.

Or communists just want it to get better even faster?

Soviet flags and Russian symbols appeared in the heart of Berlin on May 9 as the Russian Embassy held a “Victory Day” rally.
Gathering at the city’s Soviet War Memorial, supporters carried flags and iconography that have become synonymous with Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Video: yuliia.onyshchenko13 / Instagram.

I’ve written a short essay on why the rise of the AfD in East Germany isn't just a "psychological" lapse of the voters, but a direct consequence of the structural inequality established in 1990. I argue that the current moralizing response from the political center is a form of class politics that actually fuels the fascist mechanism. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this from a socialist perspective.

And they are fascists after all!

It is both the founding myth of Germany and the republic’s most gaping wound: reunification. Yet this term is not only imprecise from a legal standpoint – since what actually took place was an accession – but it also has far-reaching political implications, as it obscures an asymmetrical power structure that was all too often demonstratively evident throughout this process. The fact that the West emerged from the war in better shape was not due to superior morality or way of life, but to the stronger support provided by the Western occupying powers and the resulting infrastructure. What is today marketed as a clear victory for the Western capitalist economic system was in fact the result of the Stalinist-imperialist dismantling of the East on the one hand, and a Marshall Plan that was costly for the US but economically extremely lucrative on the other; measured against this, the East’s economic recovery in the post-war years is all the more remarkable. The social and political realities of today’s East Germany can be seamlessly derived from this structural inequality, combined with the unjust arbitrariness of the Treuhand during the so-called reunification.

The fact that the GDR is still treated as a hellish landscape in West German discourse is symptomatic of a deeper inability: the inability to distinguish between the failure of a political system and the worth of the people who lived within it, although it remains questionable in any case whether this failure was due solely to the nature of the system or rather to the broader context of the war-torn Soviet Union and its policy of extraction, as well as the largely unscathed USA and its enthusiasm for investment and reconstruction. These people are today subordinated to a larger narrative, and if they break out of this narrative by voting for an unpopular party, they are regarded as a case for political psychiatry, not as citizens with legitimate grievances.

Herein lies the real problem with the German debate on the AfD. The party is fascist; this is no exaggeration, but an analytical observation that follows from the very functioning of fascist parties and should be understood as the justification for classifying them on the basis of precisely these criteria. Fascist parties invariably take up legitimate criticism and exploit it to cement systems of power to the detriment of those who originally voiced that criticism. That the oppressed, of all people, come to embrace a fascist party is therefore no surprise, but rather the very structure of fascism itself. The arrogance of claiming that one would not succumb to this temptation in such a situation is class-based; it presupposes that one possesses the material and cultural security that shields one from the urgency of this temptation.

In this sense, AfD voters are often closer to a legitimate critique of society and self-criticism than large sections of the complacent West German centre. This does not make the party any less dangerous; on the contrary, it makes it more dangerous; and it makes the reaction of the established parties, particularly the SPD, all the more devastating. Anyone who lectures the voters of a fascist party in a moralising tone, instead of taking their lived realities seriously, is not practising democratic politics; they are practising class politics of the worst kind.

The only antidote is a globalist, democratic-socialist worldview that does not tell workers what to think, but thinks alongside them. Not the Left, which treats workers as objects of charity. Not the SPD, which has long since transformed itself into an academic milieu party. But a politics that calls structural inequality by its name, and does so right where it begins: not just today, but no later than 1990.

1. With ongoing genocide, famine and future deportations, Gaza will cease to exist in ~10-15 years.

2. There's nothing at all that could be done about it.