Reprinted below is a leaflet initially distributed by IBT supporters in London in
November 2009.
The emergence of France’s Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) has generated
considerable interest within the European left. The NPA’s charismatic leader,
Olivier Besancenot, has become a household name in France and the broad outlines of his
group’s policies are known to millions.
At the time of the party’s founding in February 2009, a public opinion poll
reported that 23 percent of respondents considered Besancenot to be the ‘best
opponent’ of President Nicolas Sarkozy, compared to only 13 percent who favoured
Martine Aubry, leader of the much larger Parti socialiste (PS), which has long been one of
the traditional governing parties of the Fifth Republic.
Many on the British left are impressed with the NPA’s popularity, but few have
more than a vague notion of what it actually stands for, or what it does. Sensationalised
red-baiting by the bourgeois press and enthusiastic endorsements by much of the ‘far
left’ have given the impression that the NPA has succeeded in winning mass support
while maintaining a more or less revolutionary profile. But a careful examination of the
NPA’s origins, politics and activity reveals it to be a reformist formation whose
leadership are chiefly concerned with electoral manoeuvring and acutely aware that to be a
major player in French politics they need to appear as militant
‘anti-capitalists’ to left-wing youth and working people.
In the final analysis, to be truly ‘anti-capitalist’ an organisation must
be committed to a revolutionary socialist programme. The NPA, which was launched by the
Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), the former leading section of the
fake-Trotskyist ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ [USec], does
not even pretend to stand in the tradition of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. In the interview in
which he first publicly floated the idea of the NPA, Besancenot explicitly spelt out its
anti-Leninist character: ‘If it [the NPA] sees the light of day, the LCR will have
no reason to exist as such. It’s about forming a militant party which resembles
society, a party which will be neither a party of passive adherents nor an elitist
revolutionary vanguard’ (Le Parisien, 24 August 2007).
Origins of the NPA
In April 1995, Arlette Laguiller, who repeatedly stood as the candidate of the
ostensibly revolutionary Lutte ouvrière (LO), first passed the 5 percent mark in
the French presidential election. LO quickly poured cold water on speculation that it
might form a ‘new party’ in a bid to displace the moribund Parti communiste
français (PCF) as the hegemonic group to the left of the PS. In the 2002
presidential election Laguiller’s vote edged up to 5.7 percent while the LCR’s
Besancenot, then an unknown young postal worker, received a surprising 4.25 percent. The
growth in support for the ‘far left’ reflected massive working-class
disenchantment with five years of capitalist austerity administered by the ‘Plural
Left’ government—a popular front composed of the PS, PCF and a few small
bourgeois fragments.
The PCF sought to distance itself from the Plural Left’s record of cuts with
condemnations of the ‘neo-liberalism’ of the European Union’s
‘constitutional’ treaty, which its erstwhile partners in the PS supported. The
PCF was joined by the LCR, an assortment of left-nationalist bourgeois mavericks and a
minority current in the PS led by Senator Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who once belonged to
Pierre Lambert’s ostensibly Trotskyist Organisation communiste
internationaliste.
The PS leadership, along with the rest of the bourgeois political establishment, was
stunned when the ‘No’ side won the May 2005 referendum on the EU
‘constitution’. The PCF, Mélenchon and various others, including a
right-wing minority in the LCR led by Christian Picquet, proposed to follow up on their
referendum victory by fielding a common candidate in the 2007 presidential election. The
LCR leadership, however, insisted that it would only participate in such a venture if
there was a firm commitment not to join any coalition government that included the PS.
When the PCF rejected this condition, the LCR opted to run Besancenot. In the end, there
was no ‘unity’ candidate, as Mélenchon decided to back the PS and the
rest of the other ‘anti-neoliberal’ groupings balked at the prospect of
becoming adjuncts to the PCF.
The result of the first round of voting in April 2007 seemed to vindicate the
LCR’s tactic. Besancenot received 4.1 percent of the vote, compared to only 1.9
percent for PCF leader Marie-George Buffet and 1.3 percent for LO’s Laguiller. Eager
to obtain the LCR’s endorsement in the second round, Ségolène Royal,
the PS candidate who was formally supported by the bourgeois Left Radicals and Jean-Pierre
Chevènement’s Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (MRC), proposed to
Besancenot ‘that he participate in public meetings and in a commission to enrich her
programme with some of [the LCR’s] propositions’ (Libération,
30 April 2007). The LCR rebuffed this overture, but nonetheless ended up supporting Royal
in the second round.
With the balance of forces on the ‘left of the left’ apparently shifting in
their favour, the LCR leadership decided to launch the NPA in a bid to pull in
eco-liberals, ‘alter-globalists’ and dissident social democrats. To this end
they were prepared to abandon any association with Trotskyism or ‘revolutionary
communism’, dissolve the LCR and rebrand themselves as simple
‘anti-capitalists’. Such sentiments are pretty mainstream within the French
workers’ movement. Even the PS, at its June 1971 Épinay Congress, advocated a
‘break with capitalism’:
‘The congress mandated its new leadership to prepare a governmental
accord with the PCF. The final motion made reference to the union of the left strategy,
the break with capitalism and the workers’ class front. Épinay marked the
real beginning of the PS and its renewed connection with the traditional synthesis of
French socialism: anti-capitalism, confidence in the reforming action of the state,
humanism….’
—‘Le Parti socialiste depuis 1971’,
www.parti-socialiste.fr
The LCR’s formal renunciation of Trotskyism in favour of a variant of this
traditional ‘French socialism’ was a signal to supporters of Buffet,
Mélenchon et al that the new party was committed to joining the reformist
mainstream. The NPA’s declaration of ‘independence’ from the discredited
PS, i.e., its categorical refusal to consider participating in any sort of coalition with
it, was only a tactical manoeuvre but posed a direct challenge to the PCF, which can only
maintain its apparatus and parliamentary representation through aggregating its vote with
that of the PS in return for a proportion of positions won. The LCR leadership calculated
that many workers who had historically supported the PCF and PS had been so alienated by
the betrayals of the Plural Left that they were indifferent to the fate of their elected
representatives in the National Assembly and local councils, and therefore might gravitate
to a new ‘anti-capitalist’ party that remained independent of the PS.
Picquet and his supporters objected to Besancenot’s ‘sectarian’
attitude towards Buffet and Mélenchon, both of whom had been ministers in the
Plural Left government. But a large majority of the LCR membership supported the proposed
turn, which was overwhelmingly endorsed in January 2008 at the group’s 17th National
Congress. That gathering issued ‘a call to everyone’:
‘individuals, activist groups, political currents, wanting to join
together in an activist, national and democratic organised political framework, a party
building international links with forces defending such a perspective.
‘We speak to women and men of all origins, with or without papers who
think their lives are worth more than profits: to youth who answer
“resistance!” in the face of attempts to leave them a precarious future; to
activists in community groups and trade unionists who take action every day in their
neighbourhoods or on the job; to socialist, anti-neoliberal and communist activists, to
all national and local political organisations or currents, who think it is time to unite,
beyond former divisions, and above all those who have not found a party appealing enough
to get involved.…’
—International Viewpoint, February
2008
To draw as many people as possible into preparing the launch of the new party, local
LCR cells set up hundreds of ‘NPA committees’ throughout France.
As the global financial crisis unfolded in the autumn of 2008, the French ruling class
was clearly becoming alarmed by the possibility of massive social upheaval. A worried
Sarkozy attempted to reassure the population that ‘the crisis is not a crisis of
capitalism’ (LeFigaro.fr, 25 September 2008). The LCR floated a few radical-sounding
proposals, including one ‘to unify all public and private banks in a single public
banking system placed under the control of workers, consumers and users’ (Le
Monde, 17 October 2008). Besancenot also suggested that it might be necessary to
‘reveal banking, commercial and industrial secrets’, i.e., to permit workers
to examine the books of the capitalists (L’Express, 26 November 2008).
Henri Weber, a PS leader who had once belonged to the LCR, denounced the
‘ultra-archaic character of the solutions’ proposed by Besancenot (Le
Monde, 30 October 2008).
NPA’s Founding Congress
The roughly 600 delegates who met in February 2009 at the NPA’s founding congress
claimed to represent some 9,000 people. At its dissolution, the LCR had reported a
membership of 3,200. While many who signed NPA membership cards were apparently not
interested enough to participate in the election of delegates, there is no question that
the NPA is significantly broader than the ex-LCR. A small minority of the new adherents is
composed of members of various ostensibly Trotskyist groupings, including Gauche
Révolutionnaire (French section of the Committee for a Workers’
International), the Groupe CRI (a small split from the Lambertists), Fraction
L’Etincelle (recently expelled from LO) and the Prométhée group.
French supporters of the International Socialist Tendency had already liquidated into the
LCR years earlier.
The main debate at the NPA congress pitted Besancenot’s majority against
‘Unir’, Picquet’s grouping, which had the support of 16 percent of the
delegates. The Unir current argued for aligning—‘without
conditions’—with the ‘Left Front’, an alliance of the PCF and the
Parti de gauche (PG), recently founded by Mélenchon’s ex-PS tendency, in the
June 2009 European elections. The NPA majority was only prepared to do so on the basis of
a firm public commitment to remain ‘independent’ of the PS. This
‘sectarianism’ was too much for Picquet who, along with a section of his base,
subsequently left the NPA and formed Gauche Unitaire, which joined the Left Front.
The ex-LCR leadership has sought to lend legitimacy to the claim that the NPA is an
entirely new formation by actively promoting new people to prominent positions. Among the
most outstanding is Raoul Marc Jennar, a former Christian Democrat from Belgium, who was a
spokesperson for radical farmer José Bové’s presidential campaign. On
his website, Jennar brags that, among his other accomplishments, since October 2007 he has
been acting as a ‘consultant to the Cambodian government and UN consultant for the
tribunal charged with judging the leaders of Khmer Rouge’. In a letter of 7 April
2008 endorsing the NPA project, Jennar asserted that it was time ‘to construct an
authentic left force that is democratic, reformist/revolutionary and pro-environment. This
means closing the parenthesis opened by Leninism, rejecting the methods (formulated in the
21 conditions) and beginning the construction of a new political subject’. With
these impeccable credentials, Jennar was put at the head of one of the NPA’s seven
party lists for the European elections.
Back to the Second International
The programmatic and organisational framework of the NPA is that of the Second
International—not of the Leninist Third International or Trotsky’s Fourth
International, neither of which admitted parties like the NPA. The ‘Founding
Principles of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste’, adopted at its first conference,
do not even mention the October 1917 Russian Revolution—the only successful seizure
of power by the proletariat to date. Instead the document refers vaguely to continuing the
work ‘of those who tried with or without success to overturn the established order
and resist oppression’. In the NPA principles ‘socialism’ is described
in Third Campist terms as something ‘radically opposed to the bureaucratic
dictatorships which, from the ex-USSR to China, usurped its name while reproducing the
mechanisms of exploitation and oppression they claimed to fight’.
While the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union, China and other deformed
workers’ states could certainly be described as ‘oppressive’, they were
also based on the expropriation of capitalist property and the suppression of the chief
‘mechanism of exploitation’ under capitalism, the buying and selling of labour
power. This ‘mechanism’ only reappeared in the USSR after the 1991 triumph of
capitalist counter-revolution spearheaded by Boris Yeltsin with the support not only of
world imperialism but of every reformist agency in the workers’ movement, including
the LCR. The reintroduction of capitalist ‘freedom’ under Yeltsin enriched a
handful of parasites, while pushing tens of millions into desperate poverty. Life
expectancy plummeted, while every sort of social pathology—from domestic violence to
murder—surged. Between 1991 and 1998 GDP fell by an estimated 40 percent.
The LCR’s ‘democratic socialist’ indifference to the defence of the
deformed and degenerated workers’ states is of a piece with the NPA’s
electoralist strategy. The parliamentary cretinism that underpins virtually all the new
party’s practical activity is complemented by the Second International-style
‘maximum’ programme outlined in its ‘Founding Principles’:
‘To put an end to crises implies putting an end to exploitation, thus to
the private property in the means of production, exchange and communication at its base.
The financial system, services essential for life and large enterprises must come under
the control of workers and the population, who will appropriate and run them within the
framework of democratic planning. Freed from capitalist property and appropriation,
production and the distribution of wealth will benefit all of society.’
The NPA’s principles note that ‘a social revolution will be necessary to
bring down capitalism’, and even mention ‘overturning’ the
bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus:
‘It is not possible to place the state and the current institutions at
the service of political and social transformation. Accustomed to the defence of the
interests of the bourgeoisie, these bodies must be overturned to create new institutions
at the service and under the control of workers and the population.’
The document also contains a rough outline of an ‘emergency programme’ to
‘prepare the socialism that we want’:
‘We defend an emergency programme which, responding to immediate needs,
calls into question capitalist property in the means of production, attacks capital and
its profits to raise wages, pensions and social-welfare minimums and satisfy the needs of
the population.
‘This programme insists upon the social appropriation of the product of
labour by the expropriation without compensation of the large capitalist groups starting
with those of the CAC 40 [the top corporations listed on the Paris stock exchange] and the
essential services and branches under the control of workers and the
population.’
The ‘Founding Principles’ propose that ‘redundancies must be banned
on pain of requisition without indemnity of companies that lay off workers’, and
call for the ‘reduction and sharing of work time until unemployment is
abolished’. In its practical activity, the NPA tends to pose its call for
‘banning’ redundancies as a policy option that should be adopted by the
existing bourgeois state.
In a nod to internationalism, the principles also proclaim: ‘Any anti-capitalist
victory in France or in a neighbouring country would have to immediately extend itself in
Europe and more broadly in the world.’ To that end, the creation of ‘a new
International’ of ‘anti-capitalist and revolutionary forces’ is
advocated:
‘…the anti-capitalists of an imperialist country must above all
struggle against their national capitalists, their own imperialist state and its army. It
is to this end that we support the expropriation, by the workers and the people of the
given country, of French companies that exploit the workers and resources of the oppressed
countries. And wherever the French army (or those of other imperialist countries) is
present, we support popular resistance and the military defeat of the imperialist
armies.’
In its most leftist formulations the NPA hints at going beyond the framework of
militant reformism:
‘It is by developing and generalising struggles, generalised and
prolonged strikes that we can block attacks and impose demands. It is the relationship of
forces issuing from mobilisation that will allow a government to be put in place to impose
radical measures that break with the system and begin a revolutionary transformation of
society.’
Yet the strategy remains essentially social-democratic, with a combination of electoral
successes and ‘popular mobilisations’ enabling an
‘anti-capitalist’ government to wield the existing state apparatus as an
instrument of social transformation:
‘From the municipality to parliament, we will support all measures that
would improve the situation of workers, democratic rights and respect for the environment.
We will contribute to putting them in place if the electors give us the responsibility.
But we will remain true to what we fight for and will not participate in any coalition
that contradicts that struggle.
‘Our elected officials refuse to co-manage the system. They tenaciously
oppose anti-social measures and defend tooth and nail, in complete independence from
right-wing and social-liberal majorities, the interests of the workers and the
population.
‘At the national level, the application of such a programme would
involve confronting the dominant classes and would demand a formidable popular
mobilisation likely to generate new forms of power that would give an anti-capitalist
government the tools for its policies.’
In its ‘General Resolution on the Political and Social Situation’, the NPA
projected ‘effective means to control the police by the population’ as a step
in the process of putting ‘an end to the Fifth Republic by a constituent process for
a social and anti-capitalist republic’. This gradualist, incremental approach, so
characteristic of social democracy, is the real content of the radical-sounding phrases
about ‘overturning’ the organs of capitalist rule.
French Workers Fight Back: NPA as Pressure Valve for
Capital
The founding of the NPA took place in the context of a massive mobilisation of French
workers against Sarkozy’s plans to respond to the global financial crisis of 2008
with further austerity and job cuts. In the first few months of 2009, workers in the
healthcare, energy, rail, postal and car parts sectors joined students and teachers in
lycées (secondary schools) and universities in a wave of strikes and demonstrations
that in some cases included factory occupations. As conflicts hardened, in some places the
control of the official union leadership was challenged by elected strike committees and
daily general assemblies. Jean-François Copé, a leading figure in
Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), did a little free publicity for
the NPA when he accused Besancenot of encouraging ‘illegal’ and
‘violent’ behaviour (Libération, 21 January 2009). There were
a few places where the justified anger of the victims of capitalist attacks went beyond
the bounds of bourgeois legality, but the NPA did not play a leading role in them. Workers
at the Continental tyre factory in Clairoix ransacked a government building at
Compiègne, while those at 3M, Caterpillar, Sony and other companies made headlines
by briefly detaining their managers—a tactic the bourgeois media denounced as
‘bossnapping’.
The trade-union bureaucracy scrambled to isolate and contain the more militant
outbursts, while also calling a series of national ‘days of action’ to let off
steam. On the first day of action, 29 January [2009], some 2.5 million people took to the
streets to protest the plans of the government and patronat (employers). A few
days earlier, the leaders of the nascent NPA signed a joint statement with the PCF, PG and
various other organisations, declaring:
‘We demand increases to wages, the minimum wage, the minimum old-age
income and social-welfare benefits. We propose the repeal of the fiscal package
of summer 2007; a redistribution of the state budget to respond to social needs and
to develop public services at all levels; a tax reform to prevent companies from, as they
do today, privileging speculation to the detriment of employment and working
conditions.’
—‘Déclaration unitaire pour le 29 janvier:
“Ce n’est pas à la population de payer la crise!”’, 26
January 2009
Less than two weeks later these same groups, joined by the PS, LO and the bourgeois
MRC, appealed to Sarkozy to make a ‘course correction’:
‘The message of the day [of action] of 29 January is clear. Those who
work…must not pay for the crisis. Contrary to what the prime minister has claimed,
the day of 29 January clearly carried the demand for a course correction
[“changement de cap”], notably on the question of wages, employment and public
services. Nicolas Sarkozy and the government cannot run away from these demands and ignore
the main points put forward in the united trade-union platform.
‘More broadly, a large public debate is necessary in the country on the
alternative measures to the current political choices that really and effectively go after
the roots of this crisis and impose a different distribution of wealth and another type of
development.’
—‘Communiqué commun des organisations de gauche
réunies le 4 février’, 5 February 2009
As working-class sentiment shifted leftward, former Prime Minister Dominique de
Villepin warned of a ‘risk of revolution’: ‘[People have the] feeling
that we’re doing a lot for the banks, we’re doing a lot to help businesses but
that the workers themselves are paying the costs of the crisis, that it’s always the
same ones who suffer’ (LePoint.fr, 19 April 2009).
While signing joint statements with reformist and bourgeois parties, the NPA
distinguished itself with repeated calls for a ‘general
strike’—sometimes even a ‘prolonged general strike’—and
suggestions that French workers should follow the example of their counterparts in the
colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique who waged general strikes lasting 44 and 38 days
respectively, wresting major concessions from the bosses. In a statement released a few
days prior to the second national day of action on 19 March [2009], the NPA noted:
‘A single “all together” day [of action] will not
suffice.
‘In Guadeloupe and Martinique, it was after several weeks of general
strike that the government and the bosses folded.
‘To ban redundancies, [to win] 300 euros net for everyone, a minimum
wage of 1,500 net [per month], to achieve the withdrawal of the neoliberal reforms, it is
necessary to prepare a general strike movement to make MEDEF [the employers’
association] and the government back down.’
—‘Communiqué du NPA. Faire céder le
gouvernement et le patronat’, 16 March 2009
The inaugural issue of Tout est à nous!, the NPA’s weekly
newspaper, called for a ‘general strike’ on its front page, and reported that
the 3 million people who demonstrated on 19 March demanded ‘that the government
change course [“change de cap”] and stop ruling for a minority’. Echoing
this sentiment, the NPA wrote that:
‘…between the extension of quality public services financed by
taxes and the multiplication of tax cuts to its friends the rich, this government long ago
made up its mind. Exactly the opposite of this policy, a tax revolution, is necessary,
with a return to progressive taxation and real taxation of profits and wealth and, above
all, capital.’
The NPA’s signature on joint declarations with the PS, the PCF and bourgeois
parties to demand that Sarkozy implement various Keynesian measures and establish a more
progressive tax system was a signal to the ruling class (and its labour lieutenants) that,
despite its sometimes leftist rhetoric, the NPA could be counted on to contain its
activities within the bounds of the capitalist political and social order.
Besancenot’s repeated calls for a ‘general strike’ were nevertheless
seen by the trade-union leaders as meddling in their affairs. In October 2008, Bernard
Thibault, leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail
(CGT), the union traditionally aligned with the PCF, complained: ‘I see that Olivier
Besancenot is attempting to be a politician while at the same time a leader of social
struggles’ (Le Monde, 7 October 2008). François
Chérèque, leader of the Confédération Française
Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), issued a similar denunciation of
‘rapacious’ NPA militants who were ‘touring enterprises in
difficulty’ (AFP, 16 March 2009).
The artificial distinction between the ‘social’ and ‘political’
spheres dates from the CGT’s 1906 Charter of Amiens, which stipulated that unions
should remain ‘independent’ of all political parties. Since the end of WWI,
this convention has routinely been invoked by trade-union and party leaders seeking to
justify the reformist activities of their parallel (and often interconnected)
bureaucracies. In a letter of July 1921, Leon Trotsky explained to revolutionary
syndicalist Pierre Monatte that the Charter of Amiens no longer had any progressive
content:
‘To every thinking Communist it is perfectly clear that pre-war French
syndicalism represented a profoundly significant and important revolutionary tendency. The
Charter of Amiens was an extremely precious document of the proletarian movement. But this
document is historically restricted. Since its adoption a World War has taken place,
Soviet Russia has been founded, a mighty revolutionary wave has passed over all of Europe,
the Third International has grown and developed.’
—The First Five Years of the Communist International
Vol.1
Within the unions the NPA’s strongest support comes from teachers and other
white-collar workers, but as the protests became more militant its influence rose in other
sectors as well:
‘Recruitment is visible notably in the car manufacturing sector with new
recruits at Renault, Citroën, Peugeot and Ford as much as in the most proletarian of
public services, such as the post office and the SNCF [railways]. But this is not yet
sufficient to constitute bastions. “We have reinforced ourselves but we don’t
yet have big company sections”, noted Basile Pot, one of [the NPA’s] leaders.
But the influence of Besancenot’s slogans is itself real. It is perhaps this
radicalisation that frightens the CFDT.’
—Le Monde, 21 March 2009
The trade-union bureaucrats were not the only ones alarmed by the NPA’s growing
influence. Xavier Bertrand, secretary general of Sarkozy’s UMP, denounced
‘certain far-left manipulators’ who ‘have but one desire: to stir up
violence’ (AFP, 25 April 2009). France’s leading right-wing newspaper, Le
Figaro (23 April 2009), reported that anonymous CGT and CFDT hacks were accusing
members of the NPA and LO of initiating most of the ‘bossnappings’ and other
radical actions.
The NPA denounced the cowardly union leaders’ role in stifling rank-and-file
initiatives, but by the last major day of action on May Day [2009], when participation
dropped to 1.2 million, Besancenot et al were toning down their agitation for a general
strike. When the tide was high the NPA leaders made no serious attempt to mobilise the
more advanced layers of workers for concrete actions that could have broadened the
struggle. Eventually the union leadership regained sufficient confidence to shift from
national protests to ‘decentralised mobilisations’, which were obviously
intended to demobilise their ranks. While complaining about this sabotage, the NPA
leadership has also formally renounced any ambition to fight for the leadership of the
labour movement: ‘The NPA told the CGT that its fear of the construction of an NPA
current inside the CGT was without foundation. The autonomy of the unions goes without
saying for the NPA’ (‘Communiqué du NPA. Rencontre NPA-CGT’, 2
October 2009).
NPA’s Reformist Electoralism
In contrast to their essentially passive role in the labour upsurge, Besancenot et al
actively prepared for the European elections, challenging the PCF and Mélenchon on
the issue of ‘independence’ from the PS. Mélenchon signalled that while
he had no affinity for the PS, he was not prepared to break with the PCF, which remained
dependent on its electoral bloc with the Socialists:
‘Jean-Luc Mélenchon has nevertheless tried to reassure his young
“comrade” [Besancenot] by evoking a durable alliance and total independence
vis-à-vis the PS. But resistance is likely to come from the PCF. Weakened for
several years, the Communists only survive electorally thanks to agreements made with the
party from rue de Solferino [PS], in particular for regional elections. It is thus risky
to distance itself from the PS….’
—Journal du Dimanche, 8 February
2009
Besancenot hoped that a strong showing in the European elections would establish the
NPA as the dominant player to the left of the PS. The NPA strategy was to attract support
from traditional PCF/PS voters who were looking for a more dynamic organisation but were
not ready to break with reformism. A 2008 opinion poll indicated that 90 percent of those
considering voting for Besancenot in the 2012 presidential election would want him to
participate in a popular-frontist ‘government of the left’
(L’Express, 26 November 2008). As leading NPA member Pierre-François
Grond put it, most of those who vote for Besancenot in the first round ‘are going to
vote left [i.e., for the PS et al] in the second round’ of elections ‘whatever
the NPA advises’ (Libération, 4 May 2009).
The NPA’s campaign for the European elections made it clear that rather than
challenging the existing consciousness of its electoral base the NPA adapts to it. In its
first official meeting, the NPA’s National Political Committee summed up their
electoral message as advancing ‘a social, democratic and eco-friendly Europe’
and ‘an anti-militarist and anti-imperialist Europe of women’s rights’
(Tout est à nous!, 26 March 2009). A key element in the NPA campaign was a
promise to give everyone a wage increase of 300 euros per month ‘by taking the 10
GDP points that have passed from the pockets of workers to those of the capitalists these
past 25 years: in France, this represents more than 170 billion euros per year’
(Tout est à nous!, 30 April 2009). The NPA proposed that ‘a
veritable energy revolution’ could be paid for by ‘a tax on the profits of the
energy sector. This would permit the creation of more than 800,000 jobs.’ According
to the NPA, through the creation of a public banking service, ‘a single European
currency like the euro and a European central bank could serve democratic planning
indispensable for placing the economy at the service of the well-being of the
peoples’ (Tout est à nous!, 4 June 2009).
Despite its attempts to appear as a practical, responsible reformist party, the NPA
only won 4.9 percent when the votes were tallied—far short of the 9 percent that
opinion polls had predicted at its founding (Le Monde, 14 May 2009). Moreover, it
failed to elect a single Member of the European Parliament (MEP). The PCF-dominated Left
Front did better, winning more than 6 percent of the vote and ending up with four MEPs.
The NPA’s disappointing showing strengthened the hand of Picquet’s supporters
who remained in the NPA. Their ‘Convergences et alternative’ grouping, which
claims to have the support of 1,000 NPA members, is represented on the NPA’s
executive committee and has a column in Tout est à nous! Convergences et
alternative has continued to argue that the Left Front and the NPA should form joint lists
to contest the regional elections in March 2010.
On 30 June 2009, Besancenot and Mélenchon (now one of the Left Front’s
MEPs) agreed in principle to the idea of ‘autonomous and independent lists’
excluding the PS in the first round with ‘technical’ or
‘democratic’ fusions with the PS in the second round
(‘Déclaration commune du NPA et du PG après leur rencontre
30/06’, 2 July 2009). The NPA failed to reach a similar agreement with the PCF,
which refused to break with the PS in the hope of retaining its 185 regional councillors.
The NPA has sought to broaden its coalition by drawing in various petty-bourgeois
anti-neoliberal, ecological, ‘alterglobalist’ and feminist movements. To this
end, it organised a series of meetings of the ‘radical left’ this autumn. The
PCF, with the support of Picquet’s Gauche Unitaire, has the PG wavering, as
Mélenchon does not want to stand independently of the PCF, which is proposing to
take a ‘flexible’ approach to the elections, i.e., to run jointly with the PS
where doing so is necessary to win.
NPA & the British Left
The Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP), the leading section of the CWI, has
endorsed the decision of its French affiliate, Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), to join
the NPA:
‘Gauche Revolutionnaire fights for the NPA to put forward a socialist
programme, based on the power of the working class to organise and change society. Such a
party could make the case for an end to the crisis-ridden capitalist system and its
attacks on living standards, through the socialist transformation of society.’
—Socialist, 25 March 2009
GR’s ‘fight’ does not seem to have gone much beyond suggesting that
the NPA’s declaration of principles be amended to call for ‘a government of
workers at the head of a new state formed by the working class organised in
committees…having overturned the bourgeois state’ (‘Amendement pour le
congrès de fondation du NPA’, 5 February 2009). Had the ex-LCR leadership
wanted to disguise the overt reformism of their project, they could undoubtedly have come
up with some equivalent formulation. But the NPA is explicitly committed to the reform of
the capitalist state, not its overturn. The CWI itself has a long history of advocating a
parliamentary road to socialism via reforming the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus
(see Marxism vs. ‘Militant’ Reformism).
If Gauche Révolutionnaire were capable of fighting for a Marxist attitude
towards the capitalist state, they would have attacked the NPA leadership’s support
of the ‘justified’ struggle of French prison wardens for ‘better working
conditions and the creation of jobs’ (Tout est à nous!, 14 May
2009). According to the NPA, ‘prison is unliveable for the wardens, too’
(Ibid.). Once again, however, it would be rank hypocrisy for GR to challenge
Besancenot on this issue without simultaneously attacking the SP, who recently sank to a
new low when they recruited one Brian Caton, general secretary of the ‘union’
of British prison officers.
The SP’s concern for the well-being of screws, cops and the other hirelings who
enforce capitalist rule is paralleled by the overt nationalism it pushed during its
campaign for the European elections as part of the ‘No2EU—Yes to
Democracy’ bloc. Joining the SP in this rotten cross-class venture were a few
‘left’ union bureaucrats, the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain and the
tiny bourgeois Liberal Party. The NPA’s social-democratic reformism was actually
somewhat to the left of the nationalist tilt of the No2EU programme:
‘Nation states with the right to self-determination and their
governments are the only institutions that can control the movement of big capital and
clip the wings of the trans-national corporations and banks. This means democratic control
of the major banks, including the Bank of England, and full public ownership and
democratic accountability of railways, postal services, NHS, and the energy
industry.’
—www.no2eu.com/economiccrisis.html
Alex Callinicos, a leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who considers
the NPA to be an ‘exciting’ venture, described the ex-LCR leadership’s
decision ‘not to make explicit commitment to the revolutionary Marxist tradition the
basis of the new party’ as necessary ‘for long-term strategic reasons’.
Callinicos’ ‘long-term strategy’ turns out to be remarkably similar to
the traditional Menshevik/Stalinist theory of ‘stages’:
‘The political experience of the 20th century shows very clearly that in
the advanced capitalist countries it is impossible to build a mass revolutionary party
without breaking the hold of social democracy over the organised working class. In the era
of the Russian Revolution it was possible for many European communist parties to begin to
do this by splitting social democratic parties and winning substantial numbers of
previously reformist workers directly to the revolutionary programme of the Communist
International. October 1917 exercised an enormous attractive power on everyone around the
world who wanted to fight the bosses and imperialism.
‘Alas, thanks to the experience of Stalinism, the opposite is true
today. Social liberalism is repelling many working class people today, but, in the first
instance, what they seek is a more genuine version of the reformism that their traditional
parties once promised them. Therefore, if the formations of the radical left are to be
habitable to these refugees from social democracy, their programmes must not foreclose the
debate between reform and revolution by simply incorporating the distinctive strategic
conceptions developed by revolutionary Marxists.’
—International Socialism, Autumn
2008
Callinicos thus essentially proclaims the project of building the type of revolutionary
vanguard party advocated by Lenin and Trotsky to be obsolete. In its place, Callinicos
proposes to return to the model of the Second International, where reformists and
revolutionaries can peacefully co-exist in what Karl Kautsky called a ‘party of the
whole class’.
Callinicos is critical of the NPA leadership’s aversion to the idea of joining
the PS in a coalition government:
‘while the LCR are entirely right to oppose as a matter of principle
participation in a centre-left government, they can’t assume that everyone attracted
to the NPA will share this attitude….
‘It is important that revolutionaries warn against the dangers posed by
the radical left participating in centre-left governments. But they should not make the
fact that these formations, if they are successful, will confront the problem of
participation a reason for not building them now.’
—Ibid.
Callinicos suspects that the ex-LCR may not be sufficiently deferential to those to its
right, and warns that it would:
‘be a disastrous mistake for revolutionary socialists to seek to
dominate the NPA and its counterparts elsewhere thanks to their organisational weight. Any
such attempt would severely hold back the development of the radical left. But this does
not solve the problem of the struggle between left and right that is unavoidable in any
dynamically developing political formation.’
—Ibid.
This parallels the criticisms of Picquet and others that Besancenot is being
‘sectarian’ towards the PCF and Mélenchon’s PG:
‘The balance of forces in France allows the anti-capitalist left to
relate to Mélenchon from a position of relative strength. But nevertheless his
break with the PS is a significant one….
‘The development of the NPA may generate more breaks, not just in the PS
but in the Communist Party as well. The NPA will have to know how to relate to such
openings in a way that involves more than just offering the choice of joining the party or
engaging in “classic” united fronts on specific issues. For all the excitement
it has generated, the NPA will be quite a small force (albeit significantly larger than
the LCR) on the French political scene and in the workers’ movement. This will limit
its capacity to lead in any real upsurge of social struggles. Realising the NPA’s
very great potential will require a willingness to intervene in the broader political
field and sometimes to make alliances with other political forces, some of which, in the
nature of things, will be reformist.’
—International Socialism, Spring
2009
French supporters of the League for the Fifth International (L5I), the international
tendency headed by Workers Power, joined the NPA hoping to see it somehow morph into
‘a new revolutionary leadership for the next round of struggle and not a weak
electoral coalition of centrists and reformists’ (Workers Power, March
2009). Correctly identifying the NPA’s founding principles as a classic
‘minimum/maximum programme’, the L5I nevertheless insists that the new party
is a ‘centrist’ formation that may yet avoid ‘the trap of accommodating
to reformism’ (‘Days of action in France: we need an indefinite general strike
to win’, 25 March 2009).
In Workers Power’s major statement on the NPA, Dave Stockton, one of the
group’s senior figures, makes the bizarre claim that launching the NPA and
repudiating any pretence of ‘revolutionary communism’ signalled a ‘sharp
turn to the left’ by the LCR:
‘The LCR’s left turn began over two years ago, in the six months
before the 2007 presidential elections. For most of the early years of this century, the
LCR had identified neoliberalism, not capitalism, as the enemy and sought to create an
anti-neoliberal party with intransigently reformist forces like Attac and the French
Communist Party (PCF).
‘The lowest point of this rightward-moving policy was the panic which
led them to call for a vote for incumbent right-wing president Jacques Chirac in [2002],
“holding one’s nose”, to keep out the fascist Jean Marie Le
Pen.’
—Fifth International Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring
2009
No sooner had Stockton’s article appeared than the NPA re-enacted this ‘low
point’ in Hénin-Beaumont (Pas-de-Calais department), where the candidate of
the fascist Front National (FN) won enough votes in the first round to qualify for a
runoff with Daniel Duquenne of the Alliance Républicaine. In response, the NPA
joined the PS, PCF and the UMP in calling to ‘block the FN in the second
round’ (Tout est à nous!, 2 July 2009)—i.e., to vote for the
Alliance Républicaine. When Duquenne beat the fascist candidate and became mayor,
the NPA declared that voters ‘have avoided the worst’ (Tout est à
nous!, 9 July 2009).*
The L5I’s claim that in launching the NPA the LCR had ‘swung to the
left’, like Stockton’s assertion that the NPA has adopted ‘positions
that are really very close to the revolutionary Trotskyist tradition’, only
illustrates the gulf that separates Workers Power from that tradition.
Workers Power also maintains that the NPA ‘has adopted a programme that is far
better, far more revolutionary than anything developed by the European left since the
collapse of the Soviet Union’ (Fifth International Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring
2009). Yet [in the same article] they acknowledge that the NPA’s programme is
essentially reformist, while pretending to think that Besancenot et al can be nudged into
promoting something approximating a revolutionary policy:
‘This revolutionary policy will mean a struggle within the NPA against
its rightwing minority around Christian Piquet [sic]. A decisive test in the class
struggle, when the question of reform or revolution is sharply posed, will mean a break
with his minority. The left majority of the NPA, meanwhile, must find clarity on the
revolutionary programme and strategy through the course of the struggles ahead and beware
of an attempt by the ex-LCR leaders to vacillate back towards the politics of reformist
concession and compromise.’
—Ibid.
The LCR majority quarrelled with Picquet over whether it was smarter to disguise
‘the politics of reformist concession’ with leftist rhetoric or serve it
straight up. The attempt to paint Besancenot’s ‘left majority’ as a
group of naïfs being pushed towards acting as a revolutionary instrument recalls
similarly optimistic projections by Ernest Mandel, Michel Pablo and others in the
LCR’s political tradition regarding an endless succession of Stalinists,
petty-bourgeois guerrillas, Third World bonapartists and assorted non-proletarian
‘blunt instruments’.
One way to make the NPA seem more ‘revolutionary’ is to contrast it to
Germany’s Die Linke, which was once greeted with enthusiasm by many on the
‘far left’:
‘Luke Cooper from Workers Power argued that in the European left over
recent years there were two divergent experiences on building a new left formation; one in
Germany had led to the consolidation of a new reformist party [Die Linke], while in France
the NPA was a fighting party, which was illustrated by its campaign for an indefinite
strike in the spring movement. He did note problems too, however. The NPA were right not
to concede to the Left Front, but they stood on a reformist platform in the elections. The
programme was indistinguishable from the Left Front’s and so the NPA had left
themselves open to the charge of sectarianism.’
—‘Marxism conference debates future of the left’,
[Workers Power statement] 10 July 2009
The reason the NPA occasionally finds it useful to posture as a ‘fighting
party’ while Die Linke wallows in passive electoralism is that French workers have
recently been considerably more combative than their German counterparts. The NPA’s
sometimes militant rhetoric is designed to appeal to PS and PCF voters disenchanted with
the discredited Plural Left.
Admitting that the NPA ‘stood in the Euro elections on a left-reformist
platform’ and is ‘unclear on the road to power for the working class and on
its attitude to the capitalist state’, the L5I also asserts that the NPA ‘was
founded as a fighting party with a political programme for the overthrow of capitalism,
not its piecemeal reform’ (Workers Power, August 2009). In his article,
Stockton attempts to disappear this glaring contradiction with an acknowledgement that
‘there are still areas for improvement and development’ in the NPA, while
praising the ‘transitional’ character of elements of its ‘emergency
programme’ as displaying a willingness to ‘challenge the laws of profit and
private ownership and open the road to socialist measures’. The idea that the
experienced reformists running the NPA may, in the heat of the class struggle, somehow
spontaneously transcend the programme that they elaborated so carefully is nothing but a
rationalisation for offloading the necessity for conscious Marxist intervention onto an
imaginary ‘objective dynamic’ in history.
The L5I was very upbeat about the NPA’s role in the strikes earlier this
year:
‘The NPA can play a critical role in all this and needs now to take
concrete actions along these lines. If it does so—and if it avoids the trap of
accommodating to reformism—it can begin to wrest leadership of the French working
class movement from the hands of the reformists and open a struggle for working class
power.’
—‘Days of action in France: we need an indefinite general
strike to win’, 25 March 2009
A statement released a week later reiterated the same idea:
‘The NPA can and must play a crucial role in the current movement. It is
the only force organised at the national level that can provide a clear perspective to the
movement and in particular become the organiser and builder of the general strike. It is
absolutely necessary for the NPA to define an action programme based on the immediate
needs of workers, the unemployed and workers with precarious jobs.’
—‘Faisons payer la crise aux capitalistes! Stop aux
“réformes” et aux attaques de Sarkozy!’, 2 April
2009
This portrayal of the NPA as uniquely capable of providing ‘a clear
perspective’, even though it is ‘unclear’ on the issues of state and
revolution, was accompanied by bogus descriptions of its attitude towards class
collaboration:
‘The NPA is in a very good position to take the leadership of the
resistance in France. Unlike the traditional parties of the working class, the NPA has no
stake in the capitalist system, which has caused the crisis, and have [sic] vowed not to
enter into coalitions and alliances with capitalist parties.’
—Workers Power, April 2009
A similar claim appeared in a statement of 10 July [2009] in which Workers Power
asserted that ‘the NPA was built from below through opposition to the union
bureaucracy and the politics of class collaboration’. It would be highly significant
if that was indeed the NPA’s policy, but it is not. The NPA leadership has made it
abundantly clear that it is prepared to enter coalitions with components of the Plural
Left—including bourgeois ones—if the price is right. Workers Power distorts
the reality of the NPA to convince the British left to use it as a model ‘to form a
new workers’ party without waiting for the approval of the trade union
leaders’ (‘It’s time to create a new working class party’, 10 June
2009).
The NPA is not the first manifestly reformist formation that the L5I has sought to
paint in ‘revolutionary’ colours. A few years ago Workers Power was hailing
the Second International and ascribing a revolutionary potential to the World Social Forum
(WSF), which we characterised at the time as ‘a popular-frontist lash-up of Third
Worldists, trade-union bureaucrats and NGO hustlers’:
‘Revolutionary Marxists say openly that we want to help it [the WSF]
develop into an international movement, able to direct the struggle against capitalism and
imperialism—a new world party of socialist revolution.
‘Over a century ago the forces of Marxism faced similar challenges
within a period of rising struggles when the movement, which came to be known as the
Second International, was born. There are many lessons to be learned in the way that this
movement was founded in 1889….’
—Workers Power, January 2003
The lesson that Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks drew from the experience of ‘a
party of the whole class’ was that revolutionaries need to organise themselves
separately from reformists. Workers Power appears to have arrived at the opposite
conclusion—which explains their consistently ‘optimistic’ distortions
regarding the NPA and the suggestion that it provides a model for the left in this
country. The ‘strategy’ is clear enough—to help build a British NPA
within which to take up residence as the ‘Marxist’ left wing. This sort of
stagist approach to building a revolutionary organisation will, in practice, inevitably
reduce itself to Kautskyism. Revolutionaries may indeed make a tactical decision to pursue
the struggle against reformism through short-term entries into bourgeois workers’
parties, but we neither advocate the creation of a reformist organisation nor project such
a development as a necessary ‘step forward’.
Marxists have a responsibility to struggle to raise the existing level of consciousness
of the ‘class in itself’ to that of the ‘class for itself’: to
help working people see the necessity of revolutionary solutions to the problems they
confront. A genuinely revolutionary group does not act in accordance with short-term
calculations of narrow organisational advantage, but rather seeks to advance the historic
interests of the working class. Any expansion of membership or electoral support is not a
gain, but a loss, if it results from programmatic compromise that undercuts revolutionary
class consciousness. The problem with the entire NPA project is that it is premised on
exactly the opposite conception.
For a Revolutionary Workers’ Party!
The attempt to create mass revolutionary workers’ parties has always presented
Marxists with difficult problems. Over a hundred years ago the great Polish revolutionary,
Rosa Luxemburg, observed:
‘The forward march of the proletariat, on a world historic scale, to its
final victory is not, indeed, “so simple a thing.” The peculiar character of
this movement resides precisely in the fact that here, for the first time in history, the
popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose
their will but they must effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing
society. This will the masses can only form in a constant struggle against the existing
order. The union of the broad popular masses with an aim reaching beyond the existing
social order, the union of the daily struggle with the great world transformation, that is
the task of the [revolutionary] Social-Democratic movement, which must logically grope on
its road of development between the following two rocks: abandoning the mass character of
the party or abandoning its final aim, falling into bourgeois reformism or into
sectarianism, anarchism or opportunism.’
—Reform or Revolution?
The duty of Marxists is always to ‘say what is’ rather than adapt to what
is currently popular. The only path to a socialist future lies through the creation of a
Leninist-Trotskyist party capable of mobilising the working class for the revolutionary
reconstruction of society in the interests of all those oppressed and exploited under
capitalism. Creating such a party requires both energy and tactical flexibility, and above
all a willingness to call things by their right names. Those who push illusions that the
recycled reformism of the NPA will provide a shortcut to the growth of mass revolutionary
consciousness do not help, but rather hinder, the struggle to build the instrument with
which ‘the popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes,
are to impose their will.’
*The NPA had initially sought to run against
the fascist candidate as part of a popular-frontist bloc with the PCF, PG, LO and the
Greens, but was spurned by its projected partners.