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Recalling French Self-Managing
Socialism 25 Years Later
 Cover
of the message
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Twenty-five years ago, socialists the world
over were talking about a new kind of socialism that they
hoped would sweep the world. Buoyed by the 1981 presidential
victory of France’s Francois Mitterrand, Socialists
everywhere were electrified by a new buzzword: self-management.
With this new word in its arsenal, the left thought it had
a program that was unstoppable.
Later that year, on December 9, 1981, a
striking six-page public interest advertisement appeared
in The Washington Post and the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung.
The advertisement was a message from the
13 Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property
(TFP) titled “What
Does Self-Managing Socialism Mean for Communism: A Barrier?
Or a Bridgehead?” written by the Brazilian TFP’s
founder and president, Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.1 The weighty document was an exposé of Mitterrand's program
of self-managing socialism and its ambitious designs for
the West.
The “Message,” as it came to
be called in the TFP, was subsequently published in 45 other
leading newspapers in 19 countries of the West. The scope
of the campaign was later extended when a one-page summary
of the Message was published in scores of other publications
worldwide in 49 countries in thirteen languages. Repercussions
from the campaign came from 114 countries.
Thus, began a worldwide debate around this
new kind of socialism that had been packaged so carefully.
Self-managing Socialism: Refining
Communism
By calling socialism self-managing, the
French Socialist Party hoped to revitalize and rejuvenate
a left in crisis. The facelift would convey a naïve
optimistic message that would appeal to many centrists.
Indeed, this could be seen in the very symbol of the French
Socialist Party: a clenched fist holding a red rose.
The TFP study sustained that the self-managing
program was not only just a reformulation of old Socialist
ideas but a refinement of Communism itself beyond the cold
rigid totalitarian state that then ruled in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe.
Self-managing socialism called for the
disintegration of society into tiny autonomous quasi-sovereign
entities that would implement locally, socialist ideas and
principles. These small egalitarian committees would govern
all aspects of French life.
Invading Private Lives
The new French Socialism hoped to apply
gradually their self-managing reforms not only to the economy
but the very structure and functioning of the family, schools,
the arts and all aspects of social life. The program even
extended into the personal lives of citizens by seeking
to organize leisure and interior decoration of houses.
Needless to say, the program also favored
the liberalization of all matters pertaining to the sexual
revolution and the destruction of the family. In the self-managing
family, the authority of the parent was undermined by new
“rights” given to minors. The state hoped to
take over the education of children at the tender age of
two.
In short, self-managing society was the
realization of the utopian Marxist ideal, which, if successful
in France, could be applied worldwide.
A Failed Ideal
With the publication of the TFP Message
on self-managing socialism, the full program of the French
Socialist Party was brought to light. Citing the original
socialist documents, the worldwide publication of the Message
provided all the elements for an immense public debate.
The fact is that a public debate did ensue
where Mitterrand and his self-managing program were questioned
and contested. The new socialism entered into crisis.
The rest is history. Like so many other
marketing labels used to mask Marxist ideology, self-managing
socialism fell by the wayside.
Indeed, the French socialists soon lost
not only their parliamentary majority, but in practice rejected
their own program before the right returned to power. They
prepared the ground for the presidency of Jacques Chirac,
who abolished many of the innovations of the first years
of the socialist government, and also annulled many leftist
initiatives of previous decades.
Negative Legacy
Russian socialist Boris Kagarlitsky wrote
in 1999: “The presidency of Mitterrand in France began
with fine hopes and ended in universal disappointment. The
failure of the most serious reformist project in post-war
Western history makes it imperative to rethink the question
of the possibilities and prospects of reformism.” 2
According to John Vinocur, writing for The New York Times, the fall of self-managing socialism
represented what he called the “failure of a method,
the abandonment of an economic theory and a crisis of the
myth and ideology that dominated French intellectual life
for nearly 100 years.” 3
President Mitterrand was forced to backtrack
to such an extent that French socialist economist Laurent
Joffrin admitted: “what was socialist did not work
and what worked was not socialist.” 4
Today, the Mitterrand legacy is often cast
in negative terms. British leftist Denis MacShane in writing
about the French leader observes: “The European left
prefers to keep Mitterrand locked away in the iron coffin
of socialist leaders we prefer not to talk about.” 5
Indeed, Daniel Singer in the American leftist
journal, The Nation, asks the question if Mitterrand’s
place will be remembered “as the unifier of the French
left or as the destroyer of its dreams?” 6
Part of the failure comes from the fact
that socialism like communism survives by hiding its final
goals. Looking back over the twenty-five years since the
Message’s massive worldwide publication, the TFP was
proud to be part of the effort that unmasked the self-managing
socialist model’s goals and destroyed the utopian
Marxist dreams it represented.
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