Le Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste est arrivé!

Le Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste est arrivé! A revolutionary party that breaks out of the ghetto of the French far left: that was the promise on offer at the February launch of the new anti-capitalist party in Paris. Christina Duval was there, listened to the debates and interviewed local activists. This is was she made of it The French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) is no more. On 6 February the largest section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) voted to dissolve itself after more than four decades of existence. The following day its ex-members were among some 650 delegates who founded a new organisation, the Nouvea Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA).

The NPA’s founding conference took place over three days in St-Denis, a working class suburb on the outskirts of Paris, just a week after French workers had staged a massive, one-day general strike, and in the context of continuing workplace struggles against the Sarkozy government’s attacks.

The idea of a new anti-capitalist party emerged in the aftermath of Olivier Besancenot’s impressive vote in the 2007 presidential election. Emboldened by the 1.5 million workers who voted for the LCR’s candidate, and the dismal scores of both the Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in the first round of the elections, the LCR threw its weight behind a campaign to mobilise the layers of militant French workers and radicalised youth who had supported the campaign into one political organisation and, in doing so, extend its influence beyond the confines of its own periphery.

The success of their project, illustrated by the hundreds of local branches that have sprung up across the country and the 9,000 card-carrying members, is a product not only of the hard work of the comrades involved, but also of the contradictory developments within the French workers’ movement since the mid-1990s, beginning with the huge strike wave of 1995 against the so-called Juppe “reforms”.

The French working class has been by far the most militant in Europe and over the past decade the French class struggle has been like a cat and mouse game. The bourgeoisie, whilst carrying out a continuous series of attacks against many of the post-war and post-1968 social gains, has been unable to deliver a decisive blow against the organised working class.

Frequently workers and youth have paralysed, or threatened to paralyse, the country. As a result, while not all struggles to defend workers’ conditions and services have been successful, there have been some victories. So, amid the gradual erosion of workers’ conditions – attacks on employment rights and wages, privatisation of services, increased repression and, in recent months, soaring price rises – the ideas of collective action and resistance to the bosses and their governments are still strong amongst significant layers of workers, particularly in the public sector.

At the same time, the PS has continued its rightward trajectory towards “social liberalism”. French workers learnt a harsh lesson in the aftermath of the 1995 strike wave. Lionel Jospin’s PS-dominated government, which came to power on the back of the strike, carried out a programme of privatisation with even more enthusiasm than the right.

The French class struggle, therefore, has been marked over the last period by an acute crisis of leadership; a militant working class ready to take on the government and the bosses, but lacking any political channel. In addition, the trade union leadership has consistently tied class action to its narrow goal of social partnership with the bosses – ideally with a “left government”, but also ready to sell out workers’ struggles for a few crumbs at the table of Sarkozy.

The yawning gap between the working class and the PS was starkly illustrated by the outcome of the 2005 ­referendum on the European constitution. Despite the PS campaigning hard for a “Yes” vote, French workers delivered a resounding “Non!” The lively committees that had sprung up around the country to campaign for a “No” vote based on a rejection of neo-liberalism, were subsequently unable to agree a united left candidate for the 2007 presidential elections, due to the PCF’s refusal to rule out participation in a PS government.

The results of the presidential election confirmed the PCF’s continuing decline, tainted as it is by its years as a junior partner of the PS government. Instead, it was Olivier Besancenot who drew the support of the most militant layers of the working class. It is this social and political context which led to the NPA initiative.

The NPA project is different from previous LCR attempts to build a broad organisation. For a start, it is not primarily a project based on left regroupment. While appeals have been made to other left groups to join the NPA, its members appear to be made up of a diverse collection of militants, young and old, many of whom have been involved in single issue campaigns, are ex-members of other organisations, or are, quite simply, new to political activity. It is this aspect of the NPA which makes it healthier than previous LCR initiatives around left regroupment, which have consisted of appeals to leaders of left organisations and tendencies. The focus on grass roots militants, in a period of recession and resistance, is likely to make the NPA a dynamic and more democratic organisation.

This “bottom-up” approach to building the NPA is less a conscious decision of the LCR than an acceptance of the failure of earlier attempts to build broad organisations. It would be fair to say that the LCR has been attempting to liquidate Trotskyist politics for many years now, looking for numerous reformist formations in which to dissolve itself, from Pierre Juquin’s Rénovateur tendency in the PCF in the late 1980s, to the anti-globalisation movement after 2000. However, it would be foolish to deny the positive nature of the current turn, propelled as it is by the dynamic of the class struggle and the experience of the betrayals of the reformist left. It would also appear that the LCR has learnt something from the experience of its sister organisations in the USFI, who have had their fingers burnt by reformist-led left regroupment initiatives elsewhere, especially in Italy.

The formation of the NPA, therefore, is to be welcomed by revolutionaries. The NPA is not a revolutionary organisation; that is, it is not a Leninist party with a scientific grasp of the tasks facing the working class on the path to power. Nonetheless, it is an important step forward and it encompasses many militants who consider themselves as anti-capitalists and revolutionaries. How it develops in the period ahead depends on the class struggle in France and, crucially, the emergence of a consciously revolutionary tendency within the NPA, which can relate to the new layers in a patient, non-dogmatic way. The NPA provides a vital political home that can be a force for uniting ­struggles, preventing demoralisation in the class whilst hammering out a programme for workers in the context of a democratic political organisation explicitly committed to class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism.

So far the indications are that the NPA is attracting a significant number of new militants, and, organisationally, there does appear to be a conscious effort to ensure that the NPA encourages and facilitates democratic decision-making. Certainly, the number of amendments that the conference had to deal with indicates a vibrant and healthy organisation. The numbers of interventions, the participation of women and youth, bode well for the organisation’s future development.

The NPA provides an essential structure through which experienced political activists can work alongside new layers and thereby serve as a powerful dynamic in the current fight against the French government as it tries to offload the crisis onto the working class, and, ultimately, create the conditions for the re-elaboration of revolutionary politics and the construction of a mass revolutionary party. However, this entails a critical reflection upon the documents approved by the delegates at the founding conference, documents that set out the parameters of the NPA’s strategy and orientation.

The founding principles were overwhelmingly endorsed by the conference (540 for, 1 against, 49 abstentions). They lay out clearly the reactionary nature of capitalism, the profound crisis-ridden and socially/ecologically ­destructive nature of the system and the need for a revolutionary transformation of society into an (ecologically sensitive) socialist one. The document cogently describes how well-being, democracy and peace are incompatible with the private ownership of the main means of production, and that all attempts to render capitalism a more just system go against the logic of capitalism itself, since humanity can only progress if the main means of production are “under the control of workers and the community” and managed according to a “democratic plan”.

Delegates, however, were divided over the overall goal of the NPA. Should it strive for “socialism” or “eco-socialism”? The conference finally opted for a third proposition, “socialism for the twenty-first century”. Much has been made of this, given its association with the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. However, it is clear that the socialism put forward, at least in the founding principles, has little in common with Chavez’s Bonapartist populism, as illustrated by the following extract:

 “We use, defend and make real democratic rights to carry out political struggle. [However] It is not possible to put the state and its current institutions at the service of a political and social transformation. These structures, committed to the defence of the interests of the bourgeoisie, must be overthrown in order to create new institutions at the service of, and controlled by, workers and the population [community].”

The document further stresses the need to go beyond the boundaries of bourgeois legality, through picket lines, the requisitioning of empty property, and protecting “illegal” migrants, opposing the legitimacy of mass mobilisation against that of the state. Also, there are frequent references to Marx – it is a far cry from the various attempts of the British left, from the Socialist Alliance to the Respect project, to establish broad parties.

However, while the founding principles do stress the importance of workers’ control and the self-organisation of the working class – in contrast to a strategy based on electoralism – the programme contains no coherent strategy for achieving working class power; the nature of the revolution that will overthrow capitalism is left open. This ambiguity is a conscious attempt to include activists from different traditions, whether “socialist, communist, [or] libertarian”, since the NPA wants to encompass the best of these traditions, while leaving unclear what aspects of these traditions represent the “best” and what aspects amount to fatal weaknesses.

The real test for the NPA is whether the immediate programme it advances is one that can both mobilise workers and imbue working class struggles with a revolutionary dynamic. The founding principles do include a comprehensive action programme, the aim of which is to make the capitalists, not the working class, pay for the crisis, starting with the “expropriation, without compensation, of the major capitalist companies and all essential services under the control of workers and the population [community].”

However, again, while the self-organisation of the working class and workers’ control are a recurring theme throughout, there is no link between demands raised and the need for a workers’ government based on the class’s own organisations. So the nature of the anti-capitalist revolution that the NPA proclaims to be its goal is left obscured.

This shortcoming is even more evident in the programme advanced in the resolution on the new party’s political orientation. The resolution sketches the main contours of the NPA’s intervention in the coming period, which the old LCR leadership hopes will provide both new members and a serious response to the economic crisis. It contains a programme of progressive reforms against redundancies, for wages linked to prices, a programme of public works, and an end to privatisation, among other key demands. These demands are said to challenge the capitalists’ right to govern. As such is it is conceived as a programme, which can chip away at the power of the bourgeoisie and highlight the necessity of socialism.

Although the ex-leaders of the LCR have made allusions to the transitional nature of this programme, this is clearly not a programme of transitional demands. Rather than chipping away at the power of the bourgeoisie, transitional demands lead inexorably to a confrontation with the bourgeoisie as the working class asserts its right to impose its own rule through the embryonic organs of workers’ power.

The section on democratic demands reveals the programme’s ultimately inchoate nature most starkly. Crowning the democratic demands for proportional representation and the abolition of the Senate and the presidency is a call for an “immediate debate” about the need to put an end to the Fifth Republic, and a “process” towards an “anti-capitalist social republic”, the nature and content of which, is ambiguous.

Advancing a programme of transitional demands, of course, would mean accepting the idea that, whilst we can learn from the experience of different revolutionary traditions (as well as from the mistakes of our own), it is the Trotskyist tradition, the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism, that holds the key to how to fight for working class power.

However, we do need to face up to the fact that Trotskyists have so far not resolved the question of how to win workers to our strategy for working class power. Small Trotskyist organisations have for decades proved incapable of rallying substantial numbers of workers in mass organisations to their programmes. However vital a clear, consistent and principled programme remains, in itself a programme without a mass base is worth little.

The NPA provides the best opportunity for decades for the French working class to build a new party that has the potential to develop a revolutionary programme, and for that, the comrades of the LCR are to be commended. That the NPA is not a perfectly formed, coherent revolutionary organisation is hardly surprising. The revolutionary potential of the NPA will be determined by the emergence of a new generation of militants, the intervention of revolutionaries, and through open and democratic debate over programme and strategy and the testing of the programme in active intervention of the class struggle.

Working class militants throughout Europe should be following the French class struggle closely in the next period, and examining the role the NPA plays in both sustaining and shaping workers’ resistance in the ­coming months.

Thu 18, June 2009 @ 17:50