30.07.2008
New party purged before its launch
LCR's move to bring together "all anti-capitalists and revolutionaries" in a "democratic, pluralist anti-capitalist party" has been called into question by an attempt to exclude from the process a small Trotskyist group - for daring to criticise the LCR. Peter Manson reports
The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, emboldened by the good result obtained by its candidate, Olivier Besancenot, in France’s 2007 presidential election, made its call for a “new anti-capitalist party” (nouveau parti anticapitaliste - NPA) just over a year ago. Among the first to respond was the Groupe Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste (CRI Group), whose leaders had been expelled from France’s largest Trotskyist organisation, the Parti des Travailleurs, in 2002.
The Weekly Worker gave a “guarded welcome” to the LCR initiative (‘Defeat the liquidators’, February 21). We saw the call for the regroupment of “anti-capitalist and revolutionary forces” into a party that would “counterpose, against the management of existing institutions, the perspective of a workers’ government” as a positive contrast to the numerous halfway house efforts that have dominated the left’s ‘unity projects’ in recent years, not least in Britain.
However, it is absolutely essential that the verbal commitment to democracy and transparency be translated into practice. Only in that way can genuine unity be established. But, if the CRI is to be believed, the LCR’s NPA project is marred by all the bureaucratic failings that we in Britain have come to expect from the Socialist Workers Party - control-freakery, manipulation and an underhand, secretive way of working.
There are around 300 local NPA “action committees” and in June, in one of the several Paris committees, a motion was passed which excluded two CRI leaders who had been attending up to then. The motion, which complained about the CRI’s attitude and style of working rather than any concrete misdemeanour, was moved by a non-LCR comrade, but carried with LCR votes. The handful of ‘independents’ for the most part either voted against or abstained. After a month of silence and a sustained protest campaign by the CRI, the committee leadership finally issued a statement on July 22 (all documents quoted here have been reproduced on the CRI website:groupecri.free.fr/index.php).
This emailed bulletin attempted to justify the exclusion. Or rather non-exclusion, since, according to the local LCR comrades, the motion refusing to work with the CRI could not be considered as such, because the NPA does not yet exist, has no statutes and therefore has no means of excluding anyone! The ‘non-excluded’ CRI comrades just can’t take part, that’s all.
Disruption
But why was the motion put? Well, the two CRI members had engaged in “repeated disruption” - although mysteriously neither the original motion nor this statement specified what form this might have taken. There followed two concrete allegations. Firstly, the CRI had “distributed their own material inside a public meeting called by the NPA committee” - an “example that sums up their more than ambiguous attitude to the NPA process”.
But wait a minute. I thought the new party was going to be “pluralist”, recognising “the right of public tendencies and currents”. And does the LCR itself not issue its own statements on the NPA in any case?
Secondly a CRI comrade had moved from one committee to another “without telling anyone or explaining why”. Finally, the CRI stands accused of throwing around “insults” - again none are specified. But by way of retrospective ‘proof’ the local LCR-led committee points to the CRI report of the Paris meeting, which referred to the non-LCR comrade who fronted the exclusion motion as a “trade union bureaucrat”. How appalling.
While at first LCR leaders dismissed the Paris move as merely a local matter and nothing to do with them, the real reasons why they feel it necessary to keep the CRI as a group out of the NPA were revealed in an internal LCR bulletin a couple of weeks after the exclusions. In a covering note, the leadership explains: “It seemed to us useful to send out an argumentaire explaining why the LCR considers that the conditions are not met for the CRI Group to participate in the process” (Lettre Rouge July 8).
However, the circular is clearly supposed to be for LCR eyes only: “Obviously it would be pointless circulating this note in committees that are not au courant in this matter and where the question has not arisen.” What was that about “transparency”?
Lettre Rouge attempts to persuade LCR members “why this group is hostile to the LCR as well as to the NPA” and how the CRI’s own project is “incompatible with the NPA”. After all, the CRI has the audacity to label the LCR leadership an example of “crystallised right centrism” and actually has the nerve to call it “bureaucratic”. Imagine! The CRI responds: “We don’t have to spell this out: with its circular calling for our exclusion the LCR leadership has itself shown how far it has taken things”.
However, what really gets the goat of the LCR is the fact that the CRI “makes a distinction between its leadership and membership”: ie, many of the latter can be won to the “inevitable recomposition” necessary to “build the Fourth International”. The CRI stands accused of wanting to “open the eyes” of the LCR rank and file “on the nature of the leadership, in order to win them to positions that are genuinely revolutionary-Trotskyist-Marxist - those of the CRI naturally”.
Absolutely unacceptable, clearly. The LCR alleges that for the CRI, the NPA is merely an opportunity to pursue an entrist tactic “to try and ‘win’ new members for the politics and project of the CRI, which are opposed to those of the LCR and NPA”. Well, excuse me, but isn’t it quite normal for organisations to try to win others to their own “politics and project”? The CRI points out in response that, when the LCR launched the NPA project, it “did not make it a condition that it must not be considered right centrist!”
On the contrary, the LCR “announced it intended to dissolve itself”, says the CRI. Yet “almost a year after the CRI Group declared its agreement with the project and four months after the launch of the committees, the LCR leadership suddenly denies it the right of continued participation in the process - under the pretext that it has dared to criticise an organisation destined to disappear!”
And who determines what is “compatible” and what is “opposed” to the NPA? The CRI comments: “It is not for the LCR leadership to decide in advance if the project for a revolutionary proletarian party proposed by the CRI Group is compatible or not with the NPA!” That is the job of the membership of the new party (which, of course, does not yet exist) - “unless it has already been decided at the top that the NPA must be an enlarged LCR, with the same orientation and the same methods”.
Destructive
Lettre Rouge admits that all this might be considered a “storm in a teacup”. However, “such micro-sect activity can be destructive, disgust and demoralise comrades, even break apart committees”. Yes, there is always the risk that, when comrades start to engage in genuine debate, feelings will become roused and tempers will fray. And it is quite possible that the CRI’s way of working might exasperate some comrades. Perhaps inexperienced people might be put off - maybe they might decide that they are not cut out to be an “anti-capitalist” or “revolutionary” after all.
But what is this CRI “micro-sect activity” that is so “destructive”? Again the LCR does not say. It is enough to have criticised the LCR leadership, it seems. However, the CRI itself claims that it has deliberately refrained from doing so at NPA meetings - “precisely to avoid any conflict and in particular any polemic between organisations”. Similarly, last year, out of “loyalty” to the new project, it did not publicise the fact that the LCR had ignored its emails and phone calls requesting discussions on cooperation in the NPA.
I can believe it. As a group that seems to adhere to every aspect of Trotskyist orthodoxy, the CRI holds to that bureaucratic centralist mantra - ‘Don’t hang out your dirty washing in public.’ It is all very well polemicising publicly against other organisations, but when you are supposed to be building a common organisation, “loyalty” demands gagging yourself - including in front of those who intend to join the NPA but are new to politics perhaps.
This is how the CRI describes its original attitude to the LCR initiative: “We had, despite our political differences, considered the official move to open up a broad, pluralist discussion amongst anti-capitalists and revolutionaries bold and responsible, which is why we made our response (we were the first to do so …). We believed it would be possible to advance revolutionary ideas and fight politically, loyally, for the NPA to be a revolutionary party with the most advanced programme possible …”
Now that it has been disabused of that idea, however, the CRI feels it has no alternative but to campaign openly against its exclusion.
But why has it been excluded? The CRI wrote last month in response to the bureaucratic move against it in Paris: “In any democratic organisation (party, union, association) … a political act as heavy with consequence as an exclusion should only be contemplated on the basis of serious and established wrongdoing …”
In Lettre Rouge the LCR responds: “But the NPA is not just ‘any democratic organisation’. It is a party in becoming, in construction. To build a party, including the pluralist party that we want the NPA to be, implies common objectives. If the minimum necessary consensus does not exist, that party is not viable. On the evidence such a consensus does not exist with the CRI Group, which is conducting an ‘entrist’ operation into the heart of the NPA. The CRI has the perfect right to oppose the political projects of the LCR and NPA. But it must do it from the outside.”
So much for the LCR’s commitment to a “democratic, pluralist anti-capitalist party”. So much for the bringing together of “all anti-capitalists and revolutionaries” and the recognition of “the right of public tendencies and currents”.
The dissident Lambertists remark: “Of course, the CRI is a small group which does not carry much weight compared to the national machine of the LCR, with its political bureau, its 3,000 members, its resources and means of communication, its access to the media … the victory of this LCR leadership offensive against the CRI Group would hardly be glorious! But why exactly does the LCR leadership, hegemonic in an NPA process which it claims has attracted 8,000-9,000 people, feel the need to launch a whole factional apparatus to exclude a small group capable of intervening in only a handful of committees?”
Confidence
It is a good question. And the CRI makes a good stab at providing an answer: “A leadership that really wanted to bring together ‘all anti-capitalists and revolutionaries’ and which had confidence in its own ideas would tell itself there would be no problem in gradually convincing members of the small groups - or let them isolate themselves - through democratic debate”. In other words, the LCR does not have “confidence in its own ideas”. Over the past year it has been giving out slightly different messages according to who is listening. If it is the right, the LCR tones down the NPA’s anti-capitalist ‘extremism’ and drops the word ‘revolutionary’. It plays up its cuddly environmentalism and feminism.
On the other hand, the LCR-drafted statement issued after the June 28-29 national meeting in St Denis near Paris declared: “It is not possible to unite in the same party those who want to finish with capitalism and those who put up with it. It is not possible to have in the same government those who defend the rights of the workers and those who defend the power of shareholders; those who want to break with liberal policies and those who put them into practice; those who want to build a Europe of the workers and the most dedicated artisans of a Europe of free competition and profit.”
It concludes: “To change the world, we need a party which fights to the end against the system, for the revolutionary transformation of society. The left that we want must be organised on an international, and in particular European, scale.”
These are fine words, but, there again, the LCR continues to spout about democracy and openness within the NPA, yet its move against the CRI tells a different story. But will the LCR leadership be able to stifle debate in the NPA? What about its own minorities, including those on the left? What about the Lutte Ouvrière minority comrades (La Fraction) or those of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, the Gauche Révolutionnaire? (Seats on the 35-strong provisional national committee were reserved for both groups on June 29, should they confirm their full participation.) And what about the comrades around the Prométhée group, which includes co-thinkers of the CPGB?
All those with a different view, especially those to the left of the LCR leadership, could be targeted. Which is why it is in the interests of all democrats, all genuine Marxists, to protest against the exclusion of the CRI and demand the comrades’ immediate reinstatement. Unless that happens, the NPA will have got off to the worst possible start.
The St Denis meeting pulled in around 1,000 people, of whom about 800 were delegates from the local committees. François Duval of the LCR leadership, writing in the Fourth International’s internet magazine, claims that “the relationship between the numbers coming from the LCR and the overall ratio is 1:3” (International Viewpoint July). Just as the SWP did in Respect, the LCR did its utmost to ensure that there were as many non-LCR comrades elected as delegates as possible - especially those to its right. There is to be a further national meeting in the autumn and a founding conference at the end of January 2009.
It will soon be possible to join the new party even before it has been founded. “This will make it possible to have a clearer idea of the number of people involved and to move towards a system of representativity in national meetings on the basis of numerical reality,” states comrade Duval.
It will also make it easier to exclude comrades accused of “destructive” “micro-sect activity”. The treatment of the CRI Group demonstrates that such comrades can expect no charges, no hearing, no right of appeal and no transparency.
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