05.02.2009

Challenge of left unity

This weekend will see the founding of a new anti-capitalist party in France. Jean-Michel Edwin looks at the different forces involved and assesses its significance in the context of the European Union

The founding congress of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) - deferred for a week because of the one-day general strike on Thursday January 29 - will take place from February 6-8. The strike would have left most delegates without transport to arrive on time in Paris on January 30.

Ironically, the action - called by all union federations against president Nicolas Sarkozy’s economic policies - was viewed by many in the NPA committees, including comrades from the most important component, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, as an encouraging sign pointing to the classic ‘general strike strategy’ (build a mass movement of workers, youth and students in opposition to the government; call a general strike, supported by coordinating committees across the country, and aim for all power to the committees).

Will the congress delegates draw the correct strategic conclusion: it is necessary to build an alternative authority capable of leading the majority class, the proletariat, to power and hold on to it? Before a final assault on the state can even be contemplated, there needs to be a strong mass party enjoying the active support of that class.

In other words, as Lenin wrote in 1901, “… the immediate task of our party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone: that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle” (‘Where to begin?’ CW Moscow 1961, Vol 5, pp14).

The question of numbers

The nature of such an organisation today ought to be clear: a continent-wide Marxist party (preferably called a Communist Party) of many millions of members. That means that the question of numbers is a real strategic issue for revolutionary activists trying to make a start by founding a new organisation somewhere on the European continent - in the present case the NPA in France. The question of numbers comes after that of a correct programmatic orientation, but before the question of name - in the case of the NPA, which one of the dozens of names proposed by rank and file members will be chosen.

The decision of the LCR congress was to aim for a 10,000-plus ‘anti-capitalist’ party rather than a revolutionary communist grouping of 3,000-4,000 members. The figure of 10,000 members is a symbolic one - considered to be in line with the 4% national vote for the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot in the 2007 presidential election - in that it represents the transition from a ‘large group’ to a ‘small party’: a qualitative step.

LCR theoretician Daniel Bensaïd said a year ago: ”You can see what we manage to do with 4,000 activists, so imagine what we could do with 10,000 or 12,000. That is not yet a mass party, but it is in the realm of the possible. If it’s possible, let’s do it. Let us face our responsibilities. Of course, it is possible that we won’t achieve it; that only in a longer term will we manage to reduce the huge gap which exists between our real forces and the popularity, confirmed in the polls, of Olivier Besancenot.”

The ‘10,000-member party’ was in fact the slogan of the old Lambertist Trotskyist tendency. After 1968, Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) and its thousands-strong youth movement, the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme, almost obsessively raised as a target the construction of a party of this size. Eventually, in order to achieve it, the OCI decided to dissolve itself into the broader, ‘non-Trotskyist’ Mouvement Pour un Parti des Travailleurs (MPPT). Later the MPPT was in turn dissolved into the larger still ‘non-Trotskyist’ Parti des Travailleurs (PT) and finally in 2008, the PT itself was dissolved into the broader still Parti Ouvrier Indépendant (POI), which claims 10,072 members. Made it at last!

The third Trotskyist force in France, Lutte Ouvrière, which has more than 2,000 members, also takes the question of numbers seriously - but in a completely different way. LO has insisted for years that its 3,000-4,000 sympathisers do not qualify as members. Its candidate members are permitted to sell the weekly Lutte Ouvrière and are allowed the privilege of distributing LO leaflets and putting up LO posters, but are excluded from the group’s discussions and decisions (they are in fact denied democratic rights for the sake of the group’s ‘revolutionary purity’) and would have long been integrated into the PT or LCR. If that had happened, LO would have been the first group to cross the 10,000 members line - reflecting its genuinely broad influence, measured by the significant electoral scores achieved by its perennial presidential candidate, Arlette Laguiller.

When Arlette scored over 5% votes for the second time, in the 1995 presidential elections, she immediately stated on television that, after this historic electoral achievement, it was time now to build a new revolutionary workers’ party and invited voters to contact LO. Some LO members took this appeal seriously and started to call on sympathisers and beyond to discuss the practical task of party-building. But the LO leadership quickly retreated and declared that the building of such a party was still “premature”. The minority, based in the Rouen and Bordeaux sections, persisted in the project of ‘building a party now’ and despite the fact they represented 10% of the membership were eventually excluded from LO. They formed Voix Des Travailleurs, which entered the LCR and formed the core of the Démocratie Révolutionnaire/Débat Militant tendency - clearly the most leftwing LCR current, which upholds some of the positive aspects of both the LO and LCR traditions.

This group, led by Yvan Lemaître, had not been in favour of splitting from LO, and has always taken the task of revolutionary regroupment seriously. In order to build a revolutionary workers’ party the LCR and LO must first be united into a single force. While the LCR majority was proposing a broad alliance of the anti-neoliberal left, Démocratie Révolutionnaire called for workers to be organised on the LCR’s own anti-capitalist programme. It demanded: no electoral front with the reformists; instead unite with LO.

Yet when the LCR congress decided to go for the ‘new anti-capitalist party’, Yvan Lemaître’s tendency welcomed the decision: “We have decided to rise to the challenge, to put our organisation at the service of the building of a new party of the workers and the oppressed ... with the aim of regrouping as broadly as possible, in one party, all those who want to acquire the means of collectively contesting the power of the financiers and their servant, Sarkozy, and who have drawn the lessons from the impotence of the institutional left.”

This leftwing tendency is, then, one of the rare currents in France that considers it possible to combine ‘broad regroupment’ with a revolutionary orientation. The DR current has since decided to become a loyal component of the LCR majority tendency, while still maintaining its own bulletin Débat Militant.

Half-success or half-failure?

A couple of weeks before the NPA founding congress around 4,500 had signed up to the new party. If it is launched with 5,000, that will be something approaching double the LCR’s membership, but only half of the hoped for 10,000: a half-success or half-failure?

The fact that the NPA will not have achieved that figure at its launch has been put down to a number of problems - not least the traditional inefficiency of the old LCR apparatus, which appears to have been inherited by the NPA. Contacts have not been properly followed up (the fault of local activists?). In addition potential recruits are said to be holding back, waiting for the outcome of the congress before joining the new party.

But what about the quality of those recruits? The NPA national committee has called for membership cards to be issued to “all interested people who have participated at any time in the process. No level of commitment is required! Only one question needs to be put to sympathisers relating to the new party’s foundation: Do you want to be part of it?”

The question of commitment is one that has been raised in the pre-congress debate within the NPA: should the new formation be a ‘party of members’ or a ‘party of activists’? Can anybody be admitted, as long as they broadly agree with the party’s aims, or should there be a requirement for members to be active?

There is another reason, not cited by the NPA leadership, for the failure to attract the expected numbers before the launch. This relates to that section of potential recruits said to be wavering ‘between reform and revolution’ - disillusioned members of the established left parties, the Parti Communiste Français or Parti Socialiste; and rank and file trade union activists or campaign militants (often the same people).

However, a number of so-called ‘alternative parties’ have recently appeared. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Parti de Gauche was launched in November 2008 (see ‘Left unity at what cost?’ Weekly Worker December 4). Then there was a micro-split from the PCF in the shape of the Nouvel Espace Progressiste (New Progressive Space), set up by former PCF general secretary Robert Hue in December. Finally there is La Fédération (whatever next?), founded on December 17 by the Communistes Unitaires (a comparatively leftwing group amongst the various PCF liquidationists), left Green elements and others - precisely the people the NPA is aiming to recruit.

La Fédération accepts - even encourages - dual membership. It seems that there are even some with triple membership - Clémentine Autain, the feminist-reformist NPA supporter spoke at the Parti de Gauche founding rally and is now one of La Fédération’s leaders. A good number of the NPA’s non-LCR contacts and potential members may have joined one of these new groups and others will certainly be ‘comparing the offers’ before making their decision.

Unfortunately you cannot console yourself about the NPA’s smaller than expected size by saying, ‘Fewer but better’. A growing number of LCR members seem to be rallying behind Christian Piquet’s liquidationist Unir tendency, which is calling for a broader, anti-neoliberal party and, not unsurprisingly, is getting support from among the rightwing recruits the LCR has been keen to attract to the NPA - and has elected to the national committee. Unir scored 10% at the LCR January 2008 congress, but could well win a much bigger proportion over the weekend.

NPA left

On the other side - the left wing - things are moving slowly, but surely. A leftwing non-LCR NPA committee member in Paris told me recently that he did not really care either about numbers or about ambiguities in the future majority line. Many comrades are pushing, individually or collectively, amendments to the founding statements and rules, but “we are not expecting them to be passed”. Nor does he expect the majority to adopt anything more than a militant left-reformist line. But that would represent “real political progress”: a space will be created where we can start to organise workers politically and we should aim to build a left tendency within it. It does not matter that the NPA will have less members than the LCR expected: “The real question is what we do within it.”

However, the degree of opposition that Yvan Lemaître’s Débat Militant leftwing current will put up is uncertain - or even if it will support the proposed left amendments. Débat Militant comrades are not likely to start any organised left tendency now. They have chosen to remain loyal majority members for the time being. What they will do later is an open question, though. Unlike Avanti, another LCR left tendency which has dissolved itself into the majority, the Débat Militant comrades have maintained their own bulletin, and this, according to the Paris comrade, is “a rather good sign for the future”.

Be loyal, don’t frighten members with ‘factions’ and left phrases - that seems to be the tactic of many individual leftwing NPA rank and file comrades, whether LCR members or not - with two exceptions.

First exception: the comrades around the Prométhée group, which has been part of the NPA process from the beginning. They consider that before the founding congress the new party profile is not yet settled and everything is still open. They are taking seriously the work of building the NPA and putting forward political arguments within it, playing an active part in various NPA committees, hosting debates and publishing discussion documents on their website.

However, they decided neither to put forward collective statements opposed to the official drafts (on principles, policy and rules) nor to go for collective amendments as a group. They think it premature to organise a Marxist tendency now: they do not consider themselves an NPA fraction, not even a nucleus of a future tendency at this stage.

Prométhée supporters in the NPA went for individual and local collective amendments aimed at clarifying the debate and leaving open the possibility of future moves. An amendment on the European elections is signed by about 15 of the group’s members and/or sympathisers: it correctly holds up the prospect of a united socialist states of Europe - a question ignored by the official statement - but, far from proposing common working class action across the European Union in the here and now, claims that this worker’s Europe can only be achieved through the “prerequisite of breaking with the EU and taking power in each country”.

In addition Prométhée supporters are - as individuals again - proposing or supporting amendments in favour of socialism and calling for serious work to be initiated by the new party not only locally but in the workplace: they want the NPA to build communist fractions in the unions as a priority.

The second exception is the group that nobody else wants to be confused with: the former Lambertists of Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste, which, together with ex-LCR and other NPA allies, have openly launched an official NPA revolutionary tendency.

Its document, called ‘For an NPA tendency defending revolution, communism and self-organisation’, is signed by 26 comrades from a number of NPA committees. It welcomes the new party and “fully approves” some of the proposed founding principles, but says that they contain “some insufficient or even ambiguous points” - for example, the general resolution on the political and social situation fails to call for a workers’ government.

The CRI says the aim must be a party based on “the historical programme of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky”, and to that end it demands firmer membership criteria: “The NPA must prove here and now its ability to play a major role in bringing together anti-capitalists and revolutionaries and in politicising a section of workers and youth.

While this platform obviously defends a very classical ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ line, its supporters are proposing an open tendency along with other “communist revolutionary” NPA currents - it names the Etincelle group (recently expelled from Lutte Ouvrière) and Gauche Révolutionnaire (the French section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International).

The presence in the NPA’s ranks of such an orthodox Trotskyist tendency is indicative of a positive aspect of the process. The fact that the amendments proposed by seven revolutionary groups have been printed and distributed in the official congress discussion bulletin and that the declared tendency has been tolerated - however reluctantly - is welcome.

However, in several local meetings, CRI supporters were denied congress delegates, the LCR majority refusing to allow them proportional or even token representation on the slate of delegates elected: in fact it is the LCR which decides which minorities are ‘acceptable’ and therefore can have their voices heard nationally. In the same localities, the CRI’s alternative texts were not put to the vote - only its amendments were heard. The group is likely to be treated the same way at congress in respect of both its alternative text and elections to the new party’s leadership, the national political committee.

Some Prométhée comrades have also been given the CRI treatment. Emile Fabrol, Prométhée’s most well known figure, was one of eight nominations for the eight slots for congress delegates in his local Paris committee, but when it was pointed out that there were five men and only three women on the proposed slate, another woman was put forward at the last minute. She, like the other seven delegates elected, just happens to be an LCR member.

Nevertheless, both groups will be represented at congress and the CRI has approached Prométhée calling for the two organisations to support each other’s amendments. However, as I write, such an arrangement seems unlikely - while in local meetings the CRI’s new revolutionary tendency has backed all Prométhée amendments (despite “minor differences”, they are said to represent a “step forward”), Prométhée supporters have opposed all the CRI’s.

Because of its mainly non-reformist and democratic perception, the NPA has recently attracted one or two more of the smaller far-left organisations, including another ex-Lambertist group called La Commune.

Disorganised democracy

Reading the discussion bulletins, and the more than 600 amendments submitted on any and every question, you are struck by the huge diversity of opinion. Some of these amendments are very briefly worded, others are lengthy; some focus on narrow points of detail, others on general questions. It goes without saying that many are opposed to each other, reflecting the discussion in the NPA between hundreds of different opinions. So how can all this be built into a single party?

Just consider one question under dispute: the name of the new party. Dozens of different proposals have been made, between which it will be extremely difficult to choose. Perhaps the simplest would be to retain ‘NPA’ on a provisional basis for “at least a year”, as some are advocating. But then a number of members insist that the party name should be anything but ‘NPA’.

Adding to the confusion, the amendments have been published in an utterly clumsy and disorganised way: they are all presented in a single column, and contain words or phrases crossed out, parentheses, italics ... It is such a mess that often you can hardly understand what change is being proposed and what exactly is to be voted on. Will it be possible, for instance, to vote for a one-word change to a given paragraph and also support an amendment replacing the whole paragraph?

In most cases, amendments are presented without any indication of which group supports them. Apart from those signed ‘Fraction l’Etincelle’ and those proposed by the CRI group’s new tendency, most texts are signed by a local committee and/or individual members. For example, Unir, the rightwing LCR tendency, has not proposed anything in its own name, but is supporting several amendments on what they consider to be key questions.

Many local committees met to consider all the texts, but delegates will be free to vote as they see fit - “imperative mandates” are not permitted. At the congress itself it will take hours just to vote and it is clear there will be no time for a proper debate on most questions. There is democracy in the NPA, for sure, but it is a disorganised democracy, anarchist style.

For example, there is one immediate point over which NPA members are deeply divided - what to do in the EU elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has raised the question and this has been echoed by the Parti de Gauche leader’s partisans in the NPA: should there be a broad left alliance to contest the June poll? It could include not only the PG, but the PCF and even the Parti Ouvrier Indépendant. This apparently purely electoral, hence tactical, question is in fact central to the underlying strategic debate: should the NPA aim to participate as a junior partner in an anti-neoliberal government or should it aim to build massive workers’ opposition to any capitalist government? The way Mélenchon’s question is answered will determine the NPA’s whole political approach.

But this question is not included in congress documents, because nobody - right or left - wants to be the first to speak on such a controversial issue. It will be left to the future executive committee to decide. Add to this the fact that the founding congress of Mélenchon’s own Parti de Gauche was held last weekend, partially stealing the NPA’s thunder and creating a somewhat charged atmosphere. He made a passionate appeal to the rest of the left, mentioning the NPA by name, not to split the vote in June. This has added to the confusion and helped arm the NPA right.

Here is a concrete example of the way in which anarchistic ‘disorganised democracy’ opens the way to petty bourgeois manoeuvring and bureaucratic control of the party.

Left unity

Last week’s one-day strike points to a potentially explosive situation in France, with Sarkozy in difficulty over not only the economic crisis, but the political one too. Yet the far left is divided between the NPA, POI and LO - nor should the PCF opposition and some ex-PS working class elements be overlooked. The question of uniting them into a single, multi-tendency party based on Marxism (class independence, extreme democracy and internationalism) is not one of mere rhetoric or propaganda, but an immediate, practical one.

What is the attitude of the different forces involved towards this vital challenge? Lutte Ouvrière decided at its December congress that it was essential to preserve its own revolutionary purity by remaining isolated and building its own forces: a hopelessly sectarian attitude. According to LO’s congress resolution, “In reality, the use of the adjective ‘new’ by those who advance the idea of a ‘new anti-capitalist party’ is only there to justify this abandonment of the revolutionary movement’s programmatic references.” Moreover, “‘unity’ is a value as loaded as the level of political consciousness is low, and has served to justify any number of betrayals”.

By contrast, the POI - while holding fast to its own brand of reformist nationalism - has continued to push outwards since the broad ‘unity conference’ it organised on December 7 2008.

It decided to aim for broad unity “without the prerequisite of an agreement on the question of the European Union” (something new for a group that wants France to pull out of the EU!) around a campaign to “ban all sackings from any workplace” - a traditional LO and LCR slogan; and to organise a big rally along these lines later this month to prepare for a “march on Paris”.

Simultaneously the POI is doing its utmost to reach agreement with PCF forces (both the official leadership and anti-liquidationist elements). Also, after discussions and a joint “official statement” with Mélenchon’s PG, the POI might well accept a common PCF-PG-POI ticket in the European elections. The POI weekly Informations Ouvrières carries an interview with Jean-Jacques Karman, leader of the PCF Gauche Communiste faction. Comrade Karman declares he will demand that PCF general secretary Marie-Georges Buffet endorse the proposed “march on Paris” (January 8).

For the LCR majority and the NPA leadership, however, everything is simple. The PCF has no future, the PG is a left-reformist election machine, LO is a purist sect and the POI is a gang of left nationalists. The implication is that no tactical alliances with the leadership of those organisations can be considered - we can only unite with their rank and file members in strikes or street demonstrations. Their sincere activists should be recruited to the new NPA party.

Europe dimension

Unir’s pre-congress statement on the EU elections takes up a very different position on the question of left unity:

“These European elections will link the reality of the capitalist crisis, the exacerbation of class confrontation, to the policies of the European Union, which … are transforming the union into an ultra-neoliberal war machine to impose on the peoples of Europe the dismantlement of social gains and the acceptance of modes of government that mock democracy …

“Faced with bourgeois policies imposed on a European scale, what kind of popular opposition will assert itself? …. The absurd scattering of the anti-neoliberal left at these elections (separate lists for the POI, LO, NPA, PCF, the [pro-José Bové] collectives and [red-green] alternatifs) would lead to an absolute monopoly in terms of parliamentary representation for parties preaching the submission of Europe to neoliberalism …

“The role of the NPA is not to maintain illusions in the possibility of spreading NPA-type electoral lists across Europe, nor to preach ‘unity for unity’s sake’. On the contrary, we need to make unity possible … on a clear political basis …

“Unitary lists are possible because an agreement of different forces … to defend an emergency programme against capitalist attacks is possible. Such a programme should be advanced across the European Union in order to show that a real alternative to the crisis can be envisaged on this scale. A social, democratic Europe is neither a slogan nor a utopia, but the choice that is demanded to avoid a major defeat” (Unir tendency, ‘On the European elections’).

Communists most certainly need to advocate united working class action across the EU, and alliances, including electoral alliances, will be necessary to achieve that. But what kind of “emergency programme” would the broad alliance favoured by Unir implement? Because it would be headed by ‘official communists’ and Mélenchon-type reformists, it would be nothing more than warmed-over social democracy - in practice a slightly more leftwing version of the Keynesian policies currently being adopted by mainstream parties in the advanced capitalist countries.

“NPA-type electoral lists across Europe” - for all our criticism of the LCR’s centrist hesitancy - are precisely what is needed. In France we must reject all talk of a left bloc that would merely be a junior partner in a future PS-led government. The NPA must draw up a minimum platform for independent working class action and be prepared to agree a common EU list with all those who will accept it.