The Exercise of Power
The “class-struggle social democracy” of Bernie Sanders is exceedingly difficult to pull off. If he wins, he'll face structural pressure to compromise: administering a capitalist state requires maintaining corporate profits. We'll need to create our own pressure through strikes and protests.
The Front Populaire Party Demonstrating In Paris 1936. On the Tribune Left-Right: Thérèse Blum, Léon Blum, Maurice Thorez, Roger Salengro, Maurice Viollette, Pierre Cot. Photo by Agence Meurisse / Gallica.
By the 1930s, French socialists had already lost much of their industrial working-class base to a Communist split. The party seemed set on a reformist path to socialism, but it still expressed its goals in explicitly Marxist terms.
Rebuilding the Socialist Party’s (SFIO) infrastructure throughout the 1920s, its leader Léon Blum grappled with the question of why and under what conditions a socialist would enter government. He distinguished between the “exercise of power” (taking office to prepare the groundwork for socialism) and the “conquest of power” (the actual dismantling of capitalism). In the end, Blum settled for the “occupation of power,” to keep it out of the grasp of fascists.
When the Jewish radical Blum rose to power in 1936, the antisemitic politician Xavier Vallat complained, “For the first time this ancient Gallo-Roman land will be governed by a Jew.” Just before becoming prime minister, Blum was dragged from a car and beaten, nearly to death, by a right-wing mob. A picture of him, heavily bandaged with swollen features, appeared on the March 9, 1936 cover of Time magazine.
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