France's "New Anti-Capitalist Party" (NPA) will hold its founding congress on Friday 30 January and Saturday-Sunday 31 January and 1 February 2009. The congress is expected to represent between 5000 and 10,000 members - that is, an organisation about twice as big as the LCR, the group which has "driven" the creation of the NPA following a decision at its own congress in January 2008.
Click here for more on the NPA project
Two smaller groups are expected to participate: the L'Etincelle faction of Lutte Ouvriere, which was expelled by LO in September 2008; and the Gauche Revolutionnaire, the small French satellite group of the Socialist Party in England. But most of the new NPA members are fresh to revolutionary party politics.
There are some parallels with the process by which Scottish Militant Labour formed the Scottish Socialist Party in 1996-8, including the fact that publicity following electoral successes (Sheridan in Scotland, Besancenot in France) has contributed a lot. The LCR, however, is more confident than SML. On the one hand, the draft documents for the NPA define it clearly as revolutionary, in a way that the SSP was never so defined; on the other, the LCR will dissolve itself when the NPA is formed, without setting up a continuator-group as controlling majority faction in the new organisation as SML did with ISM/Frontline.
France has a much bigger and more confident activist left milieu than England (or Scotland), and the organisations of the revolutionary left such as the LCR and the NPA have a much bigger public profile. The country saw big student struggles in 2006.
Nonetheless, the idea that the socialist grass is green on the other side of the Channel should not be exaggerated. Contrary to what one might expect, or at least to what I expected, the huge and partly successful strikes of 1995 were followed by a continuing shrinkage and rightward drift of the unions, which are now very weak in the private sector.
When I consulted the official French government statistics website, www.insee.fr, for France's latest strike statistics, the site was shut down by a strike at the statistics agency. However, comparative figures for France and the UK between 1997 and 2006 show more strike-days per 1000 workers in the UK than in France (an average of 21 in the UK, 15 in France), and the average increasing from 1997-2001 to 2002-2006 in the UK but decreasing in France (20 to 10). A lot of strikes in France are minority strikes, sometimes small minority strikes.
Bolshevism? Workers' government, united front
Much about the political basis of the NPA is vague. On the other hand, for some years now much has been vague politically in the LCR. A bigger and livelier organisation is better even if it is still vague. Vagueness is more easily overcome in a big and lively organisation than in a small and dim one.
In a recent interview for Solidarity, however, I raised some causes for concern.
The three draft texts for the NPA congress speak in only one place of the lessons of the 20th century. The statutes say that "the balance-sheet of the 20th century, in particular of Stalinism" indicates that the party should be organised democratically.
But the problem in the Stalinist USSR, China, etc. was not one of revolutionary workers' parties which chose bad methods of organisation. Stalinism was a social question, a question of a different social formation.
In the LCR some people have argued that part of the blame for Stalinism lies with bad methods of party organisation by the Bolsheviks. The phrase in the statutes suggests that the NPA should distance itself from Stalinism, not by discussing the history or the present-day actuality of Cuba or North Korea (not mentioned, though another text does say that the NPA's socialism must be different from the model of the old USSR or Maoist China), but by "democracy" of NPA organisation.
And there are other suggestions that "democracy" may be taken as meaning looseness. The draft "founding principles" talk about every member being able to find their place in the party "whatever their level of commitment".
That creates two dangers. First, NPA members who win positions in municipalities, in parliament, or in trade unions, are likely to take advantage of the looseness to drift under the pressure of their municipal, parliamentary, or trade-union milieu, rather than being held to NPA principles and policies. Secondly, the NPA is likely to develop an underbelly of semi-active members chronically inclined towards what Trotsky called "the path of least resistance" in politics.
The NPA defines itself pretty clearly as revolutionary. It also defines what it is against. It is anti-capitalist. But it is less clear on what it is for. In the texts there are passing references to "a government at the service of the workers" and an "anti-capitalist government", but very little explanation of what those phrases might mean, and what sort of state the NPA fights for.
The NPA defines itself sharply against the Socialist Party, sometimes in terms that would inhibit or even exclude a united-front approach to SP members. Its texts say very little about other components of the established left, the CP and the trade unions. It tends to deal with the CP just by rebuking it for its desire for governmental alliances with the SP, rather than by a united-front approach structured by a clear programme.
The lack of reference to the trade unions does not mean that NPA members will be not active in the unions. On the contrary: it suggests that the NPA may be like the LCR, with its members in prominent trade-union positions acting more as trade-unionists with a private attachment to a left party, rather than as Marxist party activists in the unions.
Debat Militant
The comrades in the LCR around the bulletin Debat Militant (which has some continuity with Voix des Travailleurs and the group expelled from LO in 1997) stated their views in no.199 of their bulletin, in July 2008.
They warn against a dissolution of fundamental Trotskyist ideas in a splurge of enthusiasm for (as an LCR catchphrase has it) a "new period, new party, new programme".
There are, however, very gentle in their polemics. They see themselves, with some justice, as having pushed the LCR considerably to the left since VdT joined the LCR in 2000; they want to avoid marginalising themselves.
Their whole outlook is shaped by their view on the "new period... since the middle of the 1990s" which they describe as "an increased resistance to neo-liberalism entering into resonance with the prolonged crisis of the workers' movement, that of the left parties as well as that of the trade-union leaderships, giving a new place to the far left".
They have an exaggerated (I think) idea of a great upsurge of working-class rebelliousness which finds no expression in the unions or the established left parties. The chief political task then becomes to adjust the self-presentation of the revolutionary left so as to enable it to channel that rebelliousness.
What few comments L'Etincelle has offered on the NPA have been similar to those of Debat Militant: welcoming the project, but warning against a dilution of Trotskyist ideas. L'Etincelle does not have the same optimism about "the period" as Debat Militant, but it is much less integrated into the NPA process.
Liaisons/ le Militant
The Liaisons group, with whom we have friendly relations for several years, are now merged with the Militant group around Raymond Debord (formerly a leader of the LCR youth and then of the French offshoot of the Socialist Party).
In no.14 of Militant (3rd quarter 2008) Vincent Presumey discussed the NPA. His attitude was friendly. However, he reproached the LCR, in its political preparations for the NPA, for not posing what he considers the key question: "a political representation of the working class uniting its different currents to kick out Sarkozy and take power".
He is right, I think, that the LCR and the NPA tend not to pose the question of the united front, i,e. of the tasks to be posed to the workers' movement as a whole. Consequently, the LCR and NPA have no real conception of a workers' government (instead: passing references to "a government at the service of the workers" or an "anti-capitalist government").
However, Vincent's line seems to me to share some of the problems of the old "Labour take the power" line of the Chartist tendency in Britain.
"Uniting the different currents of the working class to take power"? But if the working class, or a decisive section of the working class, were united "to take power", then that could not be by a unity of the existing "different currents". That could only happen by the landscape of political "currents" within the working class being completely transformed.
The CP and the SP are not proto-soviet organisations lacking only the political redirection necessary to point them towards establishing working-class power, In fact "Militant-Lettre de liaison" 42 of 7 December 2008 notes: "The old parties like the SP and even the CP have been transformed, in most cities, into parties of officials and people holding elected positions..."
Moreover, "kicking out Sarkozy" and "taking power" are not at all the same thing, if "taking power" is to be understood as working-class power. Systematically conflating the two things in propaganda makes the politics not transitional, but confusing.
Liaisons/le Militant translates its perspective, organisationally, into positive advocacy that the members of its group should also be members of a variety of bigger parties - the SP, the CP, the new Left Party (see below), and in principle also the NPA. The Liaisons/le Militant group itself thus has, in its own eyes, a sort of "brains trust" role, diffusing ideas across a range of activist parties.
Unir, Parti de Gauche
At the LCR congress in January 2007, a long-standing minority within the LCR, around Christian Picquet, opposed the NPA plan. The Picquet tendency wanted a new party, but one on the model of Die Linke in Germany.
Vincent Presumey sums up Picquet's view rather more succinctly than Picquet himself: "Picquet objects that something new cannot be built without starting off from the old, from the historically constituted cultures and currents, and thus by allowing them an association on an equal basis". Picquet wanted the LCR to pull together some of the (fairly numerous) leftish groups in France formed by splinters from the SP and the CP to create a party which would definitely not be revolutionary, but, as Presumey indicates, a sort of "association on an equal basis" of various reformist and revolutionary currents.
The Picquet tendency is now organised as a public faction, Unir. Unir announces that it will push two ideas at the LCR dissolution congress on 29 January, just before the NPA founding congress, and presumably also at the NPA congress itself.
It will advocate that for the European elections in June 2009 the NPA seeks a joint slate (on a fairly minimal basis) with the CP, the new Left Party (see below), etc. It will also advocate that the LCR continues to exist within the NPA in the form of an organised association of supporters of the "Fourth International" (the international network of which the LCR is currently part).
Some of the texts of Unir suggest that they go further than insisting on electoral coalitions with left reformists as indispensable. An article on the Unir website (5 December 2008) by Alain Faradji says that "the rupture with the system... must inevitably be based on a double process of social mobilisations and of elections, allowing the majority aspirations of the people to be reinforced, legimitised, and fully expressed, and the control of the people at each level and at each stage of the transformation". This view of revolution is upheld by contrasting it with a simplistic view of sudden insurrection ("a single and brief confrontation with the central power"); but it reads more like the old Communist Party "peaceful road to socialism" than a Marxist view. The reference to a series of elections seem to be to a series of parliamentary elections allegedly constituting the revolution, or at least one side of the "process". Unir makes much of such slogans as "a real left government".
In November, a party called the Parti de Gauche (Left Party) explicitly modelling itself on Germany's Die Linke was formed by the splitting-away from the Socialist Party of a group led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, a former Lambertist (in 1970s) and later a minister in the Jospin government.
The founding (public) meeting of the Parti de Gauche, with Oscar Lafontaine of Die Linke on the platform, drew 3000 people on the PG's account, 1000 according to some other reports. It is, as far as I understand, a smallish group, smaller than the NPA. The structure of the French electoral system allows small groups to continue in mainstream politics so long as they have reliable electoral alliances with bigger parties. Melenchon's group hopes for, and looks as if it can get, such an alliance with the CP.
Unir has welcomed the PG, but looks likely to stick with the NPA rather than going over to the PG.
Liaisons/le Militant comments tartly: "The success [which Melenchon has in mind] is that of the creation of a little party to the left of official social liberalism... on a four point programme of, let us say, a reformist or Keynesian spirit... occupying a real though small electoral space... the occupation of a 'political vacuum' left on its left by the rightward turn of the SP... It is not sectarian to point out that at this very moment the Berlin teachers are on strike against the social-liberal policy of a local coalition government in which Die Linke participates..."
