Workers’ Communist Party of France (PCOF) was born on 18 March 1979 at the Congress of the Paris Commune. Its creation was necessitated by the complete degeneration of the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the failure of the first attempt to create a new party, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France (PCMLF). This was the culmination of the struggle waged by the communists under the leadership of the Strasbourg Party Committee of the PCMLF.
The PCMLF had taken the torch from the PCF when, after several years of opportunist policies, it adopted a revisionist programme at its 14th congress in July 1956. This revisionist programme was the French version of the theses adopted by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU a few months earlier.
From that moment the question of the formation of a new communist party in France was raised. This problem was solved with the founding of the PCMLF in December 1967, after many years of struggle under particularly difficult conditions. However, this party, attacked both from outside and from within, faced with the mass movement of May-June 1968 and its subsequent banning by the Gaullist government, was unable to establish itself as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class and was attacked by a new revisionist current, Maoism. The accidental death of one of its leading leaders, François Marty, in May ’71, eliminated Communist opposition to the party leadership and opened the door to opportunist activities. It was at this point that the Communists of the PCMLF, organised in the Strasbourg Party Committee, took up the torch of struggle for a new Communist Party.
The nucleus that would found the PCOF was shaped in the struggle against revisionism in general and Maoist revisionism in particular.
PCOF is a member of CIPOML.