Against the background of Nicolas Sarkozy completing his first year in office and with more attacks upcoming, the Ligue Communiste RÈvolutionnaire (LCR) has launched a campaign for a new anticapitalist party. Martin Suchanek looks at how revolutionaries should respond to this.
In the 2007 presidential elections Olivier Besancenot, candidate of the LCR, received 4.08 per cent of the votes. While this is not the highest vote ever for a far left candidate, it was far better than the rest of the “left”. Besancenot’s percentage was not far short of all the other left candidates put altogether. Anne Marie Buffet, general secretary of the once mighty Parti Communiste Française (PCF) obtained 1.93 per cent, Arlette Laguillier, veteran candidate of Lutte Ouvriere (LO), 1.33 per cent and the self-styled “unitary candidate” José Bové received 1.32 percent.
This year in the 2008 municipal elections the LCR was able to put up 200 lists. In 114 cases, they received more than 5 percent, and in 34 more than 10 percent.
The LCR has shown itself to be the major force on the radical left with its election results and also a significant growth in its membership. Meanwhile, the mobilisations of recent years have repeatedly expressed the anger of the people with the French government, the timidity of the Socialist Party, and the search of vanguard elements for a political alternative.
So there was widespread interest when the LCR declared a year ago that a new anticapitalist party was necessary. Finally, the LCR’s 17th Congress, meeting from 24 to 27 January this year, decided by an 82 per cent majority to launch an initiative for the creation of a “new anti-capitalist party” to the left of the SP-Left and the CP. This would involve a process of local and national meetings (plus an international meeting), culminating in “the founding of a new party by late 2008 or early 2009. This would entail a congress beforehand to dissolve the LCR.”
The statement announcing this says: “There is a desperate need for an instrument promoting convergence among struggles that is able to put the powers that be on the retreat and change the balance of power. Imagining that another world is possible is also essential to raise hopes. There are many among us who want such an instrument: a party meeting the needs of contemporary mobilisations. A party to prepare a radical, revolutionary change in society, in other words, the end of capitalism, private property of the means of production, the pillage of our planet and destruction of nature.”
It continues: “The LCR national congress issues 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. “ (Call for a new anti-party, Congress of the LCR, January 2008)
Since then a number of local and national “initiative meetings” have taken place. Reports of these show that the proposal has attracted trade unionists and workers, disappointed by their reformist leaders; left activists; and also young people.
New party?
The LCR has not only grown and played a major role in the struggles of the past few years, but also shown a leftward development, albeit a contradictory one.
The LCR’s idea for a “new party” is in fact not new at all. From the mid-1990s, they pursued this goal. One concept of this is that it should be a “broad” party, i.e. it should also contain the CP and the Greens and even the “left,” “anti-neoliberal” wing of the SP. Parties such as Die Linke in Germany or Rifondazione Comunista in Italy were considered the model for this Perspective.
Clearly such a party would be a fairly unambiguously reformist party, not an anti-capitalist one. The “No of the Left” Campaign against the neoliberal Constitution, with its local committees was seen by the LCR as the basis for building such a broad, left reformist party.
The development of class struggle, particularly the movement against the CPE and the conflicts with the CP over the presidential candidacy in 2006, led the LCR to a change of position on what the orientation of a future party should be. The LCR had proposed a “common candidate of the left” to begin the broad party formation process, but with the precondition that this list be democratically determined and that there should be no post-election formation of a government with the SP. The CP rejected this precondition, arguing that participation in government could not be excluded and which wanted to bureaucratically push through Marie Georges Buffet as the presidential candidature, posing as a “rank and file activist.”
Thus the LCR faced a dilemma. Climb down completely, accept Buffet, maybe even face the prospect of a post-election coalition deal between the CP and the SP, or stand of an independent LCR candidate. Much to the dismay of the right wing in the movement, the LCR leadership chose the latter course and, even worse, met with success.
Reform or revolution
This “left development” should not lead us to ignore the LCR majority’s opportunist definition of the character of the “new anti-capitalist party”.
In an interview Olivier Besancenot gave at the time of the LCR conference, he replied to the question of whether a new party should be revolutionary: “Probably not,” he replied, because otherwise it would only become a larger LCR. Even if much is left unclear, on this much the LCR is perfectly clear: the new party will not be “Leninist” nor “Trotskyist”, even though it will be “ecological”, “feminist” and even “Guevarist.”
International Viewpoint the English Language publication of the Fourth International asks and answers the question as to the new party’s character.
“Will it be a “revolutionary party” according to the traditional meaning of this word? What we intend to build is a party for class struggle, an independent party of the working class, a party mainly focused on mobilization rather than elections, a party for radical and/or revolutionary changes in society and for new politics committed to satisfy social needs rather than private profits, an anti-capitalist party. Most probably many issues related to strategy will remain open.”
The LCR refuses to propose any specific programme for the Party, as this should come “from below”. The party should rather be confined to a few limited “principles” such as those cited above. What the LCR has in mind is clearly a party of both revolutionaries and reformists, a party that rejects “either-or” in favour of “and/or” on this basic strategic issue: that tries to be both reformist and revolutionary.
But these two strategies are incompatible because they represent opposing class positions – the peaceful, gradual improvement of the existing system, which might sometime end in “socialism” is, as Rosa Luxemburg said, in Reform or Revolution, not just a slower more peaceable way of getting to the same goal but one leading to a different goal, the preservation of capitalism indefinitely.
The other strategy is based on class struggle leading to the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the capitalist class, the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus and its replacement by the rule of councils of the working class, in short the dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact that the LCR wishes to liquidate itself and build another party built on blurring reform and revolution is yet another and perhaps a final step in its political degeneration. In this sense – in terms of its professed ideology it is a turn to the right not to the left.
Class struggle
In our view, an organisation built to bridge such a contradiction would not be viable and the demands of the class struggle, of any major upheaval caused by the onslaught of Sarkozy, would quickly face it to decide either in favour of reform or revolution.
Why? Because behind these two concepts stand mutually exclusive strategies. The very idea that both strategies and programmes can permanently co-exist within a united party, reflects once again distance between the LCR and the Fourth International on the one hand and the Trotskyism of Trotsky.
Also the LCR makes much fuss about how vital it is that the new party and its programme emerges “from below,” etc. This is, on the one hand, merely a demagogic excuse for the LCR avoiding presenting its own political passport. On the other, it is a radically false view of how revolutionary programmes are developed. Competing programmatic, strategic, tactical and organisational proposals are openly discussed and then decided according to the majority decision and tested by implementation.
This last point – disciplined application within the living class struggle of the programme’s overall strategy and specific tactics, according to the principle of democratic centralism – is not some sort of sectarian shibboleth, but a necessity for any effective fight against the ruling class.
One urgent conclusion can be drawn from the debacle of the Left in France and indeed in other countries like Italy and Britain; that the working class needs a “new type of party”, i.e. a combat party working in all the various sectors, in the trade unions, social movements and so on, the basis of party decisions and guidance. Only then can a party, not only be active in various movements, but also fight for a class struggle revolutionary leadership in these movements.
Here lies another of the fatal weaknesses of the LCR. Many of its militants do good work in the oppositional trade unions and student coordinations, or are active in the antiracist movement, or also hold leading positions in unions and campaigns. But the LCR itself had and has no strategy and tactics of its own for their members in these areas to implement and, on that basis, fight for a revolutionary leadership.
The policy of the LCR assumes, rather, that the task of its members is to more or less reproduce the spontaneous ideas of each movement. This leads involuntarily to their activists adjusting to this environment and the LCR members of the leadership bodies to the ethos of its apparatus. With this method, it is impossible to break the dominance of SP and CP dominated trade union leaders. This is naturally not possible for a party, which itself wavers back and forth between reform and revolution, i.e. having a centrist character.
Welcome opportunity
Today the leadership of LCR has taken an initiative in France, one which has the potential to attract tens of thousands of militants in the working class, in the banlieues, in the schools and universities, which could play a vital role in mounting a powerful resistance to Sarkozy and overthrowing him.
To the extent this provides for uniting action and providing a forum for debating a new revolutionary programme and party structure we welcome it and our supporters in France will participate in it. Unfortunately the strategy the LCR advocates for such a party, the idea of the hybrid party, represents the main obstacle to realising this potential.
That is also why our supporters will be arguing for our own revolutionary action programme and for a debate on the full implications of reform and revolution. Certainly we want to draw in the largest possible number of working class militants, those from a reformist tradition, those with syndicalist views, or who are just not convinced that a revolutionary programme is the only answer.
We believe that in the context of a united struggle against Sarkozy’s attacks in the coming years they can be convinced, on one condition: that the revolutionaries remain true to their ideas and try relentlessly to convince them.