Book. For those interested in the strategy of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT), which has become the leading trade union organization in terms of electoral audience, this is a very useful little essay. With a clear and knowledgeable pen, Gaby Bonnand, national secretary of the CFDT from 2002 to 2010, negotiator of unemployment insurance agreements and former president of Unédic, traces in The Choice of Reformism (Editions de l’Atelier, 160 pages, 20 euros) the progress of this union movement which, he warns, “is not a dogmatic doctrine”. This passionate Breton, who started as a fitter in the metallurgy industry, is wary of utopias. The social transformation to which he aspires does not prefigure an “ideal society”. A fierce defender of the welfare state, he rightly judges that the continued surge in poverty has left “many holes in the racket”.
Looking at the historical debate between reform and revolution, the oppositions between Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the jousts between Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde, Gaby Bonnand observes, in a political context which still underlines its relevance, that reformism in France has “an incarnation that is difficult to identify” and that it “has always had a negative connotation and has often been associated with weakness and betrayal”. He pleads for a “renewed reformism”, including in his “Pantheon of Reformism” Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, Michel Rocard and Jacques Delors, which permanently highlights “the ambition for justice, freedom, democracy and the concrete action of individuals and collectives”.
A taste of unfinished business
Gaby Bonnand does not hesitate to date the creation of the CFDT in 1919 – the year of birth of the organization from which it emerged, the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC) –, as if to demonstrate that, from the beginning, the Christian center already possessed the genes of the evolution which led, in 1964, to the true birth of the secular and reformist confederation. The former president of the Christian Workers’ Youth shows the coherence between the self-management socialist option of 1968 and the “recentering” of 1978. The first challenged “both the hegemony of communism and the centrality of the State.” The second left “a place for the contract by putting negotiation, the search for compromise at the center of the process of transformation and the emancipation of individuals”.
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Originally published at Almouwatin.com
