Before taking up the main questions they raise, let’s first clear up one issue raised by Stefan Metzeler in this week’s letters column. “France was the ONLY country where the elderly died in such great numbers,” he writes. But the Italian government, for one, admitted September 11 that at least 4,175 more people older than 65 died there than in the same period a year ago. Other governments reported increased death rates, too.

In disagreeing with the statement that capitalism is to blame for the death count, which had risen to 15,000 by September 9, Metzeler and Gene Montalvo, whose letter was published last week, repeat the fallacy that the French government and economic system are “socialist.” Montalvo writes, “I fail to see how capitalism is responsible for a socialist government’s response to heat deaths.” Metzeler states this week, “France is BY FAR the most collectivist, socialist, and centralized country in all of Europe.”

How does this square with the facts? Today’s so-called “socialist” French government is a conservative coalition led by the Gaullists. The Gaullists have been the dominant big-business party in France for decades.

For their part, despite their names, the Socialist and Communist parties have nothing to do with socialism or communism. The SP is a social democratic party and the CP is a Stalinist organization. Both follow a course of trying to reform or patch up capitalism and administering the capitalist state, not of organizing a revolutionary movement of working people to take power out of the hands of the billionaire ruling families and establish a government of workers and farmers.

For nine decades, since they helped drag workers and farmers into World War I as cannon fodder for the imperialist rulers in France, SP leaders have acted to defend the interests at home and abroad of big business. In the 1930s, by heading up a Popular Front government that included representatives of the CP and capitalist parties, they helped the capitalists derail a massive working-class upsurge and block workers and farmers from contending for power.

Through their struggles over the decades, working people in France have extracted concessions from the bosses, from the reduction of working hours to vacation pay, pensions, free health services, and other social rights. But the capitalist families—the owners of Michelin, Crédit Lyonnais, and the like—remain the ruling class and use the state to protect their interests, waging an offensive to erode these gains.

Over the past year we have been hearing shriller denunciations of the French government among big-business circles in the United States and other imperialist countries—from the United Kingdom to Switzerland.

This is for two reasons. One is the hatred of bosses everywhere for the example set by working people in France in their resistance to the attacks by the bosses and the government. In their view, Paris needs to push harder to roll back pensions, raise the retirement age, and weaken unions.  
 
Sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry
The second—and main—reason is the sharpening rivalry between imperialist powers over markets and natural resources around the globe. The anti-French rhetoric goes along with efforts by Washington to shove Paris aside in the ongoing dispute over control of the Mideast, Africa, and other regions.

Scoffing at “socialist France,” Montalvo extols the virtues of capitalism in the United States. Government and private agencies “act rapidly to assist the elderly in dealing with heat dangers,” he claims.

What is the situation facing the elderly in the United States? The figures on hunger among retired people suggest that they should not expect timely and generous action from state or churches if a heat wave should hit next summer. One in four senior citizens suffered from malnutrition by the early 1990s, early in the current crisis. A December 2002 report commissioned by city mayors said that requests for food assistance by the elderly had increased by 19 percent over the previous 12 months. Authorities should prepare for “the coming senior bubble and the predictable widespread hunger among aging, working-poor baby boomers who have inadequate retirement plans,” it said.

“The capitalist does not care about the first thirteen years of workers’ lives,” Jack Barnes observes in Capitalism’s World Disorder, “then he cares about our ability to work hard for the next fifty years; then he hopes we die quickly. That coarse attitude is what the rulers try to get layers of the working population to accept as well.”

That is the essence of the bosses’ attitude toward what they consider the “non-productive” members of the toiling classes. It underscores why we need to follow the example of workers and farmers in Russia in 1917, and Cuba in 1959, and forge a powerful movement with a revolutionary leadership to overthrow the capitalist system. That will open the way to the first steps in the construction of socialism on a worldwide basis.  
 
 
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