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Condolence Message from the Communist Party of Bangladesh-ML(CPBML)

We, Communist Party of Bangladesh-ML(CPBML), belonging to FI Bangladesh Section, are deeply shocked to hear the death news of Comrade Alain Krivine who was a distinguished figure of FI, the Ex- Deputy of France and the important Member of New Anti-Capitalist Party in France.

We pay our homage to his memories as his dedication to make efforts for an equitable and just world across his 80 years of eventful life.

He was an ideological inspiration to all people fighting for socialism from country to country in the world.

His sudden demise on 12 March 2022 is a really irreparable loss for FI.

Although he is no more, his ideals will remain among us for ages.

Nonetheless his death is unexpected to us.

We also express our deep sympathy to the bereaved family members of deceased comrade Krivine.

Long live revolution!

Badrul Alam
General Secretary
Communist Party of Bangladesh-ML(CPBML)

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From Japan: Revolutionary Salute to Comrade Alain Krivine

Comrade Alan Krivine, historical revolutionary and Marxist, passed away on March 12 at the age of 80. He was a leading figure of the Fourth International and a founder of the LCR. And he was also a genuine internationalist who lived in the struggles with the working class in the world. We would like to pay our sincere respect to his memories. Also we would like to express our deepest condolences to the bereaved families.

Fourth International Japan Section
March 19, 2022

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From Australia : Alain Krivine (1941-2022)

Alain Krivine, a leader of the student revolt of May 1968, passed away on 12 March at the age of 80. Many of the other key student leaders of the May ‘68 uprising, like Daniel Bensaïd, have also already taken their leave. Krivine’s death marks the symbolic end of a generation of French Trotskyism. With his death, we not only lose one of the key student leaders of the ‘68 events, but also a revolutionary without whom the old heritage and tradition of the earliest anti-Stalinism may not have survived into a new generation.

Krivine had a unique relation to French Trotskyism. In his memoirs, Krivine tells a story that captures the relationship to the French Trotskyists of the first hour—those who had fought through the “midnight of the century”, a time when Stalinism and Nazism were crushing all opposition. Krivine tells of being trained by Pierre Frank, who himself had been one of Trotsky’s secretaries during his first years of exile in Turkey. Each time a Trotskyist of the first hour died, Krivine would accompany Frank to the funeral, the grave and the ceremonies. Frank would recount the contributions, the character, politics and struggles of the first generation Trotskyists to Krivine.

This was a lesson in political tradition—revolutionary, not conservative, because it was about passing on the memory of courageous and honourable struggles for emancipation. Krivine stood at the intersection between an old Trotskyism with its links to the pre-war anti-Stalinist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist struggles, and the tradition rejuvenated by the May ‘68 student-worker uprising, as part of which he went on to lead the Revolutionary Communist League.

Krivine’s family was political. The many brothers of his household joined the communists from an early age, as did he, and he soon became a Trotskyist. Krivine threw himself into the struggle for Algerian liberation, and in his memoirs some of the most fascinating sections are dedicated to the work these young Trotskyists carried out in support of the Algerian resistance.

Krivine was excluded from the French Communist Party along with the communist youth. He threw himself into the campaigns against the war in Vietnam. He led the student fights at the Sorbonne and the efforts to build links between the students and workers. He served prison time throughout 1968 for his involvement in the student-worker uprising. And after founding the Revolutionary Communist League (the state had outlawed the Revolutionary Communist Youth) he became the lead presidential candidate and public spokesperson for the group.

From workers’ solidarity, through to anti-fascist struggles (which would land Krivine back in prison), through to the anti-colonial struggles from Martinique to New Caledonia—Krivine consistently gave voice to struggles of the exploited and oppressed. When he intervened on the floor, the man was a force, with poise and presence.

I got to know Krivine in Paris. He was based in Saint-Denis, where I had just relocated, and I joined his branch of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party—NPA). Every Sunday, Krivine would sell L’Anticapitaliste (the NPA’s weekly) next to the Saint-Denis food market. Krivine would take me on tours giving little history lessons about local struggles and the area’s history of communist politics. We spoke at length about the history of the Revolutionary Communist League, and in particular about his good friend and comrade Daniel Bensaïd, whose revolutionary legacy Krivine tried to ensure would be remembered.

One evening, when Krivine co-hosted the speakers’ session of the premiere of Carmen Castillo’s We Are Alive, has remained in my memory. The film—a beautiful balance sheet of the dignity of revolutionary politics—brought out the rebellious youth of all in the room. Krivine set the tone of the discussion (alongside Olivier Besancenot), and the take home message was driven home: no matter what errors or obstacles are in the way of a politics of human emancipation, it is always right to fight and resist.

From the little I knew of him, it was clear he was a man who had the constancy required for a prolonged decision in the direction of revolutionary politics, and he combined this commitment with a sense of humour, laughter and jokes. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him, but his revolutionary legacy will live on.

Darren Roso

• Red Flag. Monday, 14 March 2022:
https://redflag.org.au/article/alain-krivine-1941-2022

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From Belgium: Alain Krivine was an authentic internationalist revolutionary

Alain Krivine was an exceptional militant, totally committed to the revolutionary struggle in his country and on the international level. He had many qualities, including an unshakeable will to fight against injustice, for social emancipation and for the end of all forms of oppression.

I met Alain Krivine in person 52 years ago in October 1970 at the conference for a Red Europe organised in Brussels by the Fourth International. More than 3000 activists from all over Europe took part. I was 16 years old and had just joined the IV International a few months before. Since then, I have stayed in contact with Alain and have been active in the same international organisation as him.

Alain Krivine actively supported the process of merging the various organisations that formed the Ligue révolutionnaire des travailleurs, the Belgian section of the Fourth International, in 1971. He was present at its congress in May 1971 in Liège and came to Belgium on numerous occasions to support the organisation’s development efforts. He was a very good speaker and his contribution to the May 1968 movement was widely recognised outside France.

Alain Krivine made a major contribution to the work of the IVth International. He never spared any effort to ensure that in France and elsewhere the internationalism of the peoples and the oppressed was expressed in practice. Always ready to participate in a solidarity demonstration, to contribute to the launching of a unitary appeal, to bring his help to the realisation of a convergence between movements and individuals. Always ready to support a workers’ struggle, to promote coordination between workers from different headquarters of a multinational company.

It should be added that among his many actions, Alain Krivine played a very active role in organising the mobilisation against the initiative taken by François Mitterrand to commemorate the bicentenary of the French revolution, who in 1989 convened a meeting of the imperialist powers in Paris, the infamous G7. Alain’s desire for collective action led to the enormous success of the campaign “Debt, colonies, apartheid; enough is enough” on 14 July 1989, with a unitary march and a big concert at the Bastille with Renaud, Johnny Clegg and the Green Negresses. Alain Krivine and the LCR acted in concert with Cedetim, Gilles Perrault, Jacques Gaillot, Renaud Séchan.

This initiative, based on the Bastille Appeal for the cancellation of Third World debt, contributed to the creation in Belgium in 1990 of the Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt. Since then, this committee, which became the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts, has become an international network present in over 30 countries, including 16 African countries.

As one of the founders of this network, I can testify to the permanent support given to it by Alain Krivine.

Alain was also very motivated by solidarity with the Cuban revolution and people. It was not blind solidarity. The solidarity was critical, but it did not hesitate to support material efforts in the face of the blockade imposed by Washington imperialism.
Alain Krivine, until a few years ago, actively participated in the meetings of the bureau of the Fourth International. He never withdrew from activity in his own country. He was always convinced that the struggle for revolution was taking place on a global scale and that the Fourth International should be strengthened as much as possible. He never considered the Fourth International to be the only international revolutionary organisation. He knew perfectly well that it had to be strengthened, opened up and regrouped. This is why he put a lot of energy into the efforts to create a common framework between anti-capitalist organisations on a European scale in all their diversity. This work must undoubtedly be taken up again at a time when a new war is underway on European soil. Alain Krivine has devoted a lot of energy to supporting the comrades who formed the section of the Fourth International in Russia several years ago and who are now fighting against Putin’s imperialism.

On a personal level, I always appreciated Alain’s great human qualities in the small details as well as in the big ones, in the good moments as well as in the difficult situations. He was also always ready to try to answer a request for information on the struggles going on in France, on the action of the NPA, available to communicate an address useful for the action, ready to give a hand to facilitate a contact, to try to raise morale when in doubt.

Alain was a great friend, a great revolutionary, a great comrade.

Éric Toussaint, member of the bureau of the Fourth International

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From Britain: ‘He never gave up the fight’ – remembering Alain Krivine

Manus McGrogan

Alain Krivine (1941-2022) was a life long revolutionary socialist known for his activism since the May 1968 student revolt and general strike in France. Manus McGrogan, who interviewed him, recounts Krivine’s life and activism.

The French revolutionary left has lost one of its most prominent historical figures. Alain Krivine, best known for his activism during the events of May 1968, his candidacy for the French presidency in subsequent years, and longstanding leadership of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), has died aged 80.

Krivine was born in Paris in 1941, into a Jewish Ukrainian family that had escaped nineteenth century antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe. As a teenager he joined the youth wing of the French Communist Party, but quickly became a dissident over the party’s opposition to Algerian independence from France.

He then joined the Young Resistance network, encouraging young men not to enlist (or to desert) in the French army’s brutal war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and later secretly sheltered and spirited FLN militants and materials across France. Back at the Sorbonne University as a humanities student, he was regularly involved in ‘clearing the streets’ of pro-French-Algerian fascist thugs, and supporters of the far-right paramilitary OAS gang.

By the early 1960s Krivine had been won to Trotskyism, and was eventually excluded from the Communist Party youth group for his oppositional activities. Undaunted, he co-founded the Revolutionary Communist Youth (JCR), a group he later characterised as ‘more Guevarist than Trotskyist’, due to members’ lionising of Latin American guerilla movements. The JCR were central to the many anti-war ‘Vietnam committees’ that sprang up across France in 1966-67.

On 3 May 1968, Krivine was one of several hundred political activists and students to occupy the courtyard of the Sorbonne. This was in protest at the University’s disciplining of Nanterre students (among them Daniel Cohn-Bendit) for their activity against the Vietnam war and French authorities. The forcible evacuation and arrest of the occupiers by the police sparked the student demonstrations and riots of May ’68, during which outrageous riot police brutality compelled trade union leaders to call a one-day general strike on 13 May.

Over a million people marched through Paris in protest, and within days, students and workers had spontaneously taken over their universities, factories, offices and shops. It turned into the greatest general strike the world had ever seen, with the country paralysed by the power of ten million workers. The government came close to meltdown and the President, Charles de Gaulle, actually retreated to consult with his generals at the German border, where he was advised (apocryphally) to ‘pull himself together’.

The JCR were in the thick of the action from start to finish, often featuring in film and photos of the events. Krivine himself can be seen in images haranguing crowds of students in the occupied lecture halls, and leading the JCR chants, megaphone in hand during the big marches. Hoping to make common cause with the workers, Krivine and the JCR led a march from the Sorbonne to the gates of the giant Renault-Billancourt factory, only to find that the CGT union had bolted the gates, fearful that the students’ radicalism might infect the strikers.

In July, the tide turned against the radicals, as a combination of police repression and the pressure of compromising trade union leaders saw the strike movement ebb and student occupations falter. The party of De Gaulle had won a crushing victory in the general elections of June, and the new hardline Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin suppressed radical groups, accusing them of being part of an international communist conspiracy. Eleven revolutionary organisations were banned and their leaders jailed, among them Krivine and several of his JCR comrades.

Yet despite the end of May’s mass movement, the JCR interpreted the events as a ‘great dress rehearsal’ for the revolution to come. With Krivine quickly freed, they regrouped as the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. With a triumvirate leadership of Krivine, Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber, the Ligue stood out from the plethora of far-left and ultra-left small groups of ’68’s aftermath, by virtue of their greater organisation, sharp political analysis, and openness to new movements.

In May 1969, while doing his military service, Krivine made history as the first open revolutionary to stand in the first round of the French presidential elections, appearing on TV and papers with the slogan ‘Power does not lie in the ballot box’. But although the Ligue would promote him as the candidate of the ‘movement of May’, it was perhaps not surprising following the conservative Gaullist backlash that he could only poll 1% (still a creditable 236,000 votes).

In the 1970s the Ligue threw itself into a variety of campaigns and movements in colleges, universities and workplaces, welcoming the arrival of new social movements of women’s and gay liberation, antiracism, and building opposition to militarism and nuclear power. Always to the fore, Krivine sought to articulate the latest position in his articles for the Ligue’s newspaper Rouge.

In June 1973, he was back on TV news defending the Ligue’s molotov cocktail attack on a fascist meeting (and ensuing clash with the police) outside the Mutualité hall in Paris. This was the pretext for Marcellin to ban the Ligue and arrest Krivine again, despite future Socialist President François Mitterrand’s public intercession on his behalf.

But just as before, the Ligue resurfaced anew as the LCR, just in time for the 1974 presidential elections in which Krivine stood again. However, on this occasion he was eclipsed by another Trotskyist candidate, the bank worker Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle). Fresh from her leading role in a bank strike, she campaigned on a ticket of ‘a woman, a worker, and a revolutionary’ gaining 2.5% (to Krivine’s 1.5%).

Thereafter, she would become the stand-out revolutionary candidate in French presidential elections, although she and Krivine successfully campaigned on a joint ticket to win seats in the European Parliament in 1999. In the 2000s it was the turn of dynamic young postal worker Olivier Besancenot (of the LCR) to stand in the presidential elections, scoring around 4% – a million or more votes – in both 2002 and 2007. It was Krivine who convinced Besancenot to stand, and mentored him in the process. In 2008, they both helped found the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) to take a broader radical left movement into the 21^st century, whereupon Krivine would take a backseat in French politics.

The late Daniel Bensaīd spoke of Krivine’s selflessness in his autobiogaphy An Impatient Life:

He couldn’t be corrupted morally, materially or by the media. Alain was like a reassuring older brother, rigorously egalitarian, always ready to pitch in. He was always available, even in the middle of the night, to rush to the aid of a comrade caught in a police cell; happy to eat whatever was put in front of him and put up with the worst militant accommodation.

Leftists in France and worldwide have been effusive in their praise and tributes to him. Even opponents have struggled to say a bad word. Indeed, the office of President Emmanuel Macron (hardly a friend) issued a statement saluting Krivine’s ‘life of commitment and militancy, led with passion and a thirst for justice and equality’. The wily old Trotskyist would have cringed at this, especially as he backed the incendiary, anti-poverty gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement of 2018-19 which Macron attempted to crush.

The last word should go to the NPA, which states on its website that: ‘Until the very end of his life, Alain never gave up the fight, or gave in to the notion that ‘You’ll get over it as you get older’.’ He will be sorely missed.

Manus McGrogan -22 March 2022

Manus McGrogan is a historian who has written widely on the events of May 1968 in France and their legacy, as well as the global radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. He is the author of Who the hell is Karl Marx.

• https://www.rs21.org.uk/2022/03/22/he-never-gave-up-the-fight-remembering-alain-krivine/

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