Marc Lasalle and Dave Stockton reports on the crisis in the NPA as it heads for the presidential elections
IT IS a paradox that in the depths of the most severe and prolonged crisis of capitalism since the Second World War, France’s New Anticapitalist Party is itself in deep crisis.
Since the founding congress of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) in 2009, there has been no shortage of social struggles – in the universities and the lycées, in the banlieues and workplaces. Some of them, like the 2010 movement against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension law, were of exceptional strength and duration. The movement peaked on 12 and 19 October days of action, when 3.5 million people were on the streets and power station and refinery workers took indefinite strike action. If the entire movement had joined them in an all out general strike, Sarkozy’s government would have been brought down.
The failure of the NPA to make a breakthrough to become large fighting party in such a heightened period of class struggle cannot be put down to objective factors, from a lack of resistance or a workers movement hostile to revolutionary politics. Instead it lays in the inner contradictions of the NPA itself and its failure to rise to the potentialities of the situation. It seems the NPA membership has fallen back from 9,000-10,000 of its first year to around 3,000 today.
The NPA contradictions
The League for the Fifth International (LFI) has always regarded the NAP founder, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire) (LCR) as a centrist organisation combining revolutionary and reformist elements in its politics in an unstable mix. Like the Fourth International, of which it is the largest section, it has for a long while sought to build parties and an International not on the basis of its own politics but as an mélange of a range of traditions, stemming from libertarianism and left Stalinism (Guevarism, Maoism). However, these projects have rarely got off the ground. The NPA is by far the most successful attempt.
The reason we welcomed the NPA was that the LCR opened a process of mass meetings across France and advanced a prospect of debate and discussion on its programme. Thousands joined the new initiative, but this healthy process did not last for long.
The old LCR had a habit of alternating between involvement in mass days of action called and led by the unions, sometimes with waves of youth movements, and electioneering on a left reformist programme. This pattern was soon repeated in the NAP. Electioneering, with its inevitable temptations to form electoral blocks with one or another of a cluster of small left parties, has always been a source of illusions in the ‘great breakthrough’. These have been invariably followed by frustration and disappointment – with a mass of principles thrown overboard en route.
Since the LCR rejoiced in its division into several permanent factions, an untroubled development for the NPA was unlikely, especially if growth slowed or election successes were not sustained.
Right and Left
Since the beginning of NPA, the ex-LCR right wing has been a powerful obstacle to building the new party. Two incarnations of these currents, Christian Piquet’s Gauche Unitaire and Convergences et Alternatives, rapidly split from NPA to join the Front de Gauche (FdG). Those who remained have openly sabotaged party activities – protected by the extremely lax party discipline. For instance, the bulk of the NPA full-time apparatus belong to these pro-FdG trends.
At the January meeting of the NPA National Council (the leading body between congresses), the current version of the right wing, confusingly called the Anticapitalist Left (GA), unashamedly called for an end to the presidential campaign of the NPA candidate Philippe Poutou, saying that the campaign had no political function, “therefore no audience, and this weakens our ability to diffuse our ideas.”
The GA strategy is to stop the campaign for the presidential election in order to prepare the campaign for the parliamentary elections in June. They would like to turn this campaign into a joint campaign with FdG with the cynical and hopeless argument: “If we must be marginal, it is better to be so inside a functioning party, rather than inside the NPA.”
However, the right wing is not the only obstacle to NPA. Its historic centre faction, based on leaders like Alain Krivine, Olivier Besancenot and François Sabado, have shown that they lacked any vision of the NPA development, indeed any strategy for it whatsoever.
The party has turned out to be a halfway house between reform and revolution. Only a clear and sharp debate on programme involving all the new members could have clarified this muddle. But according to the LCR ‘s tradition, a programme is little more than a catalogue of measures to be popularised during an election campaign, like wage increases, defence of public services etc. There is no conception that a programme is a more general understanding of the tasks and struggles of the party and no idea that it must be a strategy for a revolutionary seizure of power.
Then came the first electoral battles and the confrontation with reformism. It is significant that today NPA has no well thought out approach towards reformism. Its only foundation is the pragmatic position raised to the status of a dogma: “we will not support the Socialist Party (PS) or ally with parties that will not commit themselves not to support PS.“ That the NPA intends to stand against the PS and will not join coalitions to administer the bourgeois state at local or national level is a correct position.
Of course this call obscures the fact that it may be necessary – and indeed be perfectly principled – to call for a critical vote for François Hollande in the second round of elections where the PS will almost certainly face only a right-wing bourgeois party – Sarkozy’s RPR or Marine Le Pen’s FN. Millions of French workers will undoubtedly do so. It is a historic weakness of the far left that it never understood Lenin’s tactic of critical electoral support – “like the rope supports the hanged man.” Its objective is the exposure of the reformists in office, starting with placing key demands on the PS that can break illusions and start the process of a fight against François Hollande should he win.
On top of this, the electoral platform contains nothing concrete: no talk of a general strike, of the need to form councils of action, co-ordinations, assemblies in the workplaces, nor of the concrete experience of the two or three major social movements that took place over the last five or six years. Above all there is no mention of the fact that the union leaders sold them out and led them to defeat, that the non-PS left (i.e. the Communist Party (PCF) and the Partie de Gauche (PdG)) offered no leadership at the critical moment, supporting the union leaders. One would think the only problem in the French workers movement was the PS and is right wing policies in government.
Because there is no concrete perspective of a revolutionary upheaval with working class democratic organs of struggle being formed the question of the NPA willingness to govern and the reforms (for they are all reforms) it would take are dealt in a similar feeble manner.
Where is the NPA going?
What is then the perspective for NPA in the election and after? At the moment, given the weakness and disorientation of the left, a crippled, paralysed and rightward moving NPA is a real danger.
After the presidential elections, the parliamentary elections will probably follow the same course. This would not be a catastrophe if the NPA leadership were not obsessed about success in the election as the only true measure of party building and had not permeated the rank and file with their electoral cretinism.
Given this culture a widespread demoralisation for the election-oriented oriented NPA is, unfortunately, a probable outcome, with or without a split inside the organisation. Yet for all its limits and failures, the NPA remains today a focus point for many of the best activists. It could play a central role in the resistance against austerity, whether it comes from Sarkozy or Hollande.
But to play this role, the party must be virtually refounded. It must acknowledge its electoralist and trade union errors, and launch a struggle for an action programme against austerity. in the unions, the workplaces, and schools and universities. It must radically break from the practice of strictly separating politics (elections and demonstrations) from trade unionism.
Despite the NPA members active involvement in all the strikes and days of action, despite Besancenot’s outspoken rejection of the CFDT leaders demand the NPA keep off the picket lines in 2010, the party does nor see as its role as a strategist on all the fronts and for all the sectors of the class struggle.
Elections must not be a chase after votes on a minimum programme but a tribune from which to call for a revolutionary strategy in the struggles to come whoever wins the elections. The social movements and days of action must not be left in the hands of union leaders who have sold them out time and again. The NPA must warn of their treachery, organise rank and file democratic over them, campaign to reject any sell-out and recruit the best uion militants to the party.
The NPA is now threatening to fall victim to the project of keeping to a course halfway between reform and revolution that the LCR leaders designed for it. These inner contradictions are now threatening to undermine the enormous positive potential the NPA showed when it attracted thousands of working class militants and youth in 2009.. But even if the NPA is in decline and confusion, the struggle for its future can still be waged. For these reasons we not only call for a vote for Poutou but for a fight for a revolutionary programme against reformism and centrism in the ranks of NPA.
This is an edited version of the original article: http://www.fifthinternational.org/
