[Marxism] France: New Anti-Capitalist Party `a very exciting initiative'

[PoliticNow@xxxxxxx]

France: New Anti-Capitalist Party `a very exciting  initiative'
Interview by Jim Jepps  
_http://links.org.au/node/814_ (http://links.org.au/node/814)  
December 22, 2008 -- There's been surprisingly little discussion in the UK on 
 the launching of the _New  Anti-Capitalist Party_ (http://www.npa2009.org/)  
(Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste or NPA) over the  water in France. I thought 
I'd take a look at this interesting and significant  new development and so I 
spoke to John Mullen, the editor of _Socialisme International_ 
(http://www.revue-socialisme.org/) , to  see if I could find out more.  
You recently attended the French launch of  the "New Anti-Capitalist Party". 
How did it go? 
The official founding conference will be in January 2009. For the moment  
there are 400 âcommittees for a new anti-capitalist partyâ all over France. 
The  
Ligue Communiste RÃvolutionnaire (LCR) was the force which proposed and  
coordinated the foundation, and will dissolve itself into it in a couple of  
months time. I attended the November national delegate meeting as one of the  
delegates for my town. 
The meeting was very encouraging. The new party initiative is obviously  
attracting a lot of people, many of them young, others are experienced union  
activists, mostly (apart from the LCR members) people who have not been in a  
party as such before. Obviously for the moment, there is quite a lot of  
concentration on the preparation of a programme to be voted at the founding  
conference. Nevertheless many committees have been active in campaigning on the 
 issue 
of the financial crisis, defending schools and universities against budget  
cuts, defending illegal immigrants against expulsions and so on. 
Four-hundred committees seems like an  impressive number of groups for an 
organisation that hasn't even been launched  yet. How do these committees 
operate? How large are they, for instance would you  have more than one in a 
town? 
Essentially are they the new party in waiting or  are they the campaign for the 
new party? 
It is impressive. In Montpellier, a day-long regional meeting got 2000 people 
 to it, a similar regional meeting in Marseilles got 1500, other towns had 
huge  meetings. National commission meetings on ecology, on politics in 
working-class  neighbourhoods and so on have produced wide debates and 
proposals. 
Essentially  the committees are already the new party in embryo â every week 
there 
is a  national political leaflet given out in almost all the towns. But the 
committees  also have a lot of autonomy. In one town there will be a public 
meeting on the  financial crisis, in another a symbolic invasion on the local 
hypermarket to  protest against the governmentâs refusal to raise the minimum 
wage. The LCR  already had very much a federal sort of organisation (for better 
and worse), and  this will no doubt continue. 
But the party-in-embryo does not yet have a regular publication, an essential 
 element for a campaigning party. Nor does it yet have a proper financial  
structure, though plans have been made for subs based on income. There is a  
website, and a weekly paper should be set up two months after the founding  
conference. 
So what's the thinking behind the new  organisation? After all, even more 
than the UK, there's no shortage of left-wing  groupings. 
The massive strike waves and political movements of the last few years have  
shown that there are many, many people in France who would like to build a  
political alternative on the radical left. Olivier Besancenot, the spokesperson 
 
of the Ligue Communiste RÃvolutionnaire, has recently had significantly 
higher  popularity ratings than Sarkozy or his prime minister, Fillon. But this 
 
widespread sympathy for radical left ideas has not led people to join far-left  
parties to anything like the extent one might think. And the Socialist and  
Communist parties are generally identified as âthe parties who donât change 
much  when theyâre in governmentâ, even if the Socialist Party has not yet 
been 
fully  converted to Blairism. 
The New Anti-capitalist Party was called for by the LCR (and the LCR will be  
dissolving and merging with it). The idea was a party which is based on  
struggle, where elections are secondary, but which does not ask members to all  
identify with a specific revolutionary or Trotskyist position. 
Who's currently involved in this  initiative? 
The only big organisation involved is the (soon to be ex-) LCR. And a few  
thousand individuals, quite a few of them well-known local or even national  
leaders of the non-party radical left, which has been quite big here for a  
number of years. 
Inside the NPA, some activists want to draw the lines of the party fairly  
narrow, to be absolutely sure not to include people who are too quick to ally 
in 
 local or regional government with the Socialist Party and their acceptance 
of  neoliberalism. Others would like to make the party considerably broader, 
because  they are worried that people who put mass movements and strikes at the 
centre of  their politics, and are firmly opposed to the dictatorship of 
profit, will be  kept out of the party if the lines are drawn too narrowly. 
Discussions continue  on this. But the present name of the party, 
âanti-capitalistâ, 
represents the  compromise position at present. We want people who are 
opposed to capitalism,  who generally believe that capitalism cannot be durably 
given a human face. 
This means that inside the party you have people close to anarchism, close to 
 radical green politics, close to Che Guevaraâs ideas etc. etc. The debates 
are  very interesting every time each current avoids simply affirming its 
identity  and makes sure the questions are looked at in depth. 
Do you think the current crisis in the  Socialist Party is something that 
might bring dividends to the new project? The  Left Party (Die Linke) in 
Germany 
certainly benefited from having a leading SPD  member behind the project from 
the start. What are the prospects for attracting  the best parts of the 
Communists, Socialists, Lutte OuvriÃre and, I guess, the Greens? 
Recent economic and political events certainly will boost the new party. It  
is not hard to get people to listen to anti-capitalism these days â waves of  
sackings are making sure of that. And the relative paralysis of the Socialist  
Party, and the Communist Party will certainly make it easier for the NPA to  
build support. 
The situation is however complex, and the NPA is not the only organisation  
trying to crystallise the radical left. To go through the parties one by one,  
but briefly: 
The Trotskyist organisation of a few thousand activists, Lutte OuvriÃre, is  
opposed to the New Anti-Capitalist Party to such an extent that it broke with 
a  very long tradition by allying itself with the Socialist Party in the 
municipal  elections last April, rather than risking an alliance with the LCR 
and 
the  non-party radical left. 
For Lutte OuvriÃre, all these people in the NPA are not revolutionaries and  
therefore not interesting. Over the last few years, Lutte OuvriÃre has been  
completely cut off from any of the big unity political campaigns (against the  
European constitution, against the far-right politician Le Pen etc). LO sticks 
 strictly to âworkplace issuesâ and is in decline because of this. It has 
just  expelled the minority current from its ranks because this current wanted 
to work  with the New Anti-capitalist Party. 
The leadership of the Communist Party (PCF) won a good majority at its  
conference for a âbusiness as usualâ motion putting alliances with the 
Socialist  
Party at the centre of its strategy. All minority motions did very well 
though.  Whole sections of communists are leaving the party (many favourable to 
a  
federation of the radical left). But its paper and its good analyses of the  
economic crisis mean the PCF still has an audience. 
The Socialist Party has seen two historic events in the last six months.  
First, a significant split to the left by Mr MÃlenchon, who has now 
established  
a new party âLe parti de gaucheâ on the model, he says (but much smaller), 
of 
 Germany's Die Linke. It will be founded very soon, and will attempt to fill 
the  gap between the Socialist Party âletâs manage capitalism more 
humanlyâ 
line and  the âalmost revolutionaryâ line of the New Anti-Capitalist Party. 
It 
could  become an important force, itâs hard to say. 
The second key event is that SÃgolÃne Royal, the Tony Blair of the Socialist  
Party, was defeated by an alliance much to the left of her (though not that  
left), on a very close poll. This is excellent news, and means that left  
arguments will be more audible. The radical left should be able to point up the 
 
difference between the left speeches of Martine Aubry, the new leader, and the  
lack of support for key struggles from this absolutely electoralist party. 
Finally, some of these fragments, as well as teams from the non-party left,  
have just set up a âFederationâ of left forces and activists, to try to 
overcome  the bittiness of the radical left. The idea is that different forces 
and  
individuals can join it to run joint campaigns, but donât need to leave their 
 own organisations â dual membership is encouraged. This Federation is backed 
by  a number of important figures. 
The upshot of all this is that the New Anti-Capitalist Party has a lot of  
decisions to make about who to work with on what. For example, for the European 
 
elections in 2009 â is it better to have united slates of candidates across 
the  radical left (I think so) or to have an independent âNew Anti-capitalist 
Partyâ  slate so as to be able to put forward a clearer platform. 
The tendency within the New Anti-Capitalist Party is to rock forwards and  
backwards between sectarianism and unity politics. I am not talking about mad  
small-group sectarianism (because the new party will start with many thousands  
of people). But that sectarianism which always emphasises first of all our  
differences with other groups, and finds a host of reasons why we cannot work  
with them even for limited aims. There is a real tendency inside the NPA to  
think âwe are the only real leftâ or âof course we want unity: people 
from 
other  organisations should leave them and join us instead, then weâll be 
unitedâ
. The  tendency towards sectarianism is the biggest danger for the NPA. The 
numbers,  relative youth, enthusiasm, energy and real pedagogy for explaining 
key issues  are the most important positive points. 
In Britain there has been an ongoing  difficulty with left unity projects 
where revolutionaries have been determined  to hang onto their autonomy within 
the broader alliance to the extent that it  can create, to my mind, unnecessary 
conflicts and distrust of separate agendas.  What's the position of the LCR, 
as the most significant organised current in the  NPA, on this tricky balancing 
act between retaining distinct organisation within  the NPA and submerging 
their efforts into it? 
An old and tricky problem, and you and me wonât necessarily see it in the  
same way. In my opinion the problem comes when differences are not discussed 
but 
 separate agendas are pushed forward in rather hidden ways. 
I personally would like to see the NPA declare: âThe NPA is a party which has 
 some people who are revolutionaries and others are not. Debate will continue 
 within the party on these issues, while together we build all the struggles  
which are needed to oppose the dictatorship of profit.â This is not really  
happening. There is a tendency to hide differences. So for example, on the  
question of whether the NPA is a revolutionary party or not, the posters will  
say âA party to revolutionise societyâ and a whole number of other 
formulations 
 which avoid the question. 
This âformulation politicsâ was already one of the banes of the LCR. On a  
difficult question, find a formulation which upsets no one, instead of deciding 
 the question. Some of the formulations had no meaning â 
So, it is an ongoing question. To emphasise that the aim of the LCR is not to 
 control the NPA, the LCR is officially dissolving itself just before the  
foundation of the NPA, and there is no plan to maintain an LCR current inside  
the NPA. I think it likely that the different currents that were in the LCR 
will  end up setting up three or four currents in the NPA, which seems fine to 
me. As  Socialisme International, our tiny group of comrades, along with a 
couple  of dozen others will certainly set up openly a current based on IS 
ideas 
(close  to British Socialist Workers Party's theories). 
To sum up, the New Anti-Capitalist Party is a very exciting initiative and  
everyone should build it. The new economic crisis means workers have even more  
of a need for a party based on class struggle, and there is a new generation 
of  young activists being built very quickly. I hope the NPA will quickly work 
with  wider federations, and in this way help to win partial victories on 
important  points, while continuing the debate on how to definitively eliminate 
 
capitalism. 
[John Mullen is an anti-capitalist activist in the south-west of France and  
editor of the review _Socialisme  International_ (http://www.revue-soci
alisme.org/) . This interview first appeared on Jim Jepp's blog,  _The Daily 
(Maybe)_ 
(http://jimjay.blogspot.com/) , nad has  been posted at _Links International 
Journal of Socialist  Renewal_ (http://links.org.au/)  with permission.
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