The French "Anti-Capitalist Party"

I wanted to discuss what the former French Revolutionary Communist League did when they dissolved into the "broader" anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). I totally oppose this strategy as social-democratic, reformist, and non-revolutionary. I am for unity, but what the hell ever happened to the United Front, where parties could maintain their autonomy, and revolutionary parties could remain revolutionary, but this seems more like the Stalinist popular front method, which has been proven time and time again to be unsuccessful in bringing about socialism. Why not have a broad united front of various parties, all opposed to capitalism and for workers' democracy, but who healthily compete for workers' support democratically? This is the revolutionary way, not giving up your position as a vanguard party to be "broader."

I think the biggest problem with the formation of the NPA is that LCR/FI comrades didn't cohere as an organized tendency. The formation of an anti-capitalist party might be something useful as a way of pushing the struggle forward, but where is the perspective of winning the NPA over to the building of a revolutionary party? It's really a /tactical/ question for revolutionaries, not a principled question. Read some of the discussions over the "French Turn" in the US Trotskyist movement.

Participation in a centrist formation is not something that's prohibited somewhere in the "sacred texts" -- The questions is whether you liquidate the revolutionary progran in doing so. "there was and could be no universal formula, applicable everywhere and under all conditions. More accurately, if there was a universal formula, it was this: the small propagandist groups of communists must convert themselves into mass communist parties by winning to their side the militant workers who are moving, however uncertainly and hesitantly at first, in the same general direction." Shactman /Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?/
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol...-rev/index.htm

The task, I think is to fuse ourselve politically with the most revolutionary-minded people in these sorts of parties.

Exactly. From what I heard the comrades in Gauche Revolutionaire (The Fench section of the CWI) are in discussion with a couple of other trotskyist groups inside the NPA about forming a united revolutionary opposition.

Exactly. From what I heard the comrades in Gauche Revolutionaire (The Fench section of the CWI) are in discussion with a couple of other trotskyist groups inside the NPA about forming a united revolutionary opposition.

Please elaborate on this. Do you mean to say that they are going to reform a truly Marxist party or at least tendency within the NPA?

Please elaborate on this. Do you mean to say that they are going to reform a truly Marxist party or at least tendency within the NPA?

The plan is to form an organized left tendency within the NPA, but this is still in pretty early stages as far as I am aware.

whats the point of forming a "tendency" when you can form a political party? Political parties have led revolutions, not factions of parties.

It's a /tactical/ question. Revolutionaries want to fuse politically with the most advanced elements of the class. Sometimes, this means joining larger centrist, or even reformist, parties in order to do so. Example: the entry of the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party in the US in the 30s. Building a revolutionary party isn't a /"field of dreams: 'if you build it they will come'/ type of activity. It takes a constant assessment and readjustment of your strategy and tactics. It also takes a real-world engagement in the movements. The opposite of this is the /toy bolshevik/ type of organization that is purely propagandistic and has no involvement in the struggles of the class. If it were possible to just "form a party" we would already have one.

Still, our goal is the building of a party worthy of the name - a mass-based working class revolutionary party - and leading the fight to overturn this criminal system.

Check out Cannon's piece on the Revolutionary Party http://www.marxists.org/archive/cann...1967/party.htm

It's a very radical party, and I don't think all that different in orientation than the LCR, but will hopefully grow. Part of it based on the popularity of Olivier Besancenot (he polled nearly 5% in a presidential election, a figure unheard of revolutionary Marxists in adavanced capitalist countries) and previous or potential electoral coalitions seem to have dried up. The LCR and Lutte Ouvrier had one or two joint campaigns, but the LO pulled the plug.

The Greens are way to the right, the CP is totally bureaucratic and really enmeshed in governance, Jose Bove's party (the one I thought would complement the LCR best...) is way deep in collaborative politics at the EU level.

I think really hope is to gather left splits or currents from those parties (as well as the Socialist Party) and social movement activists into one activist based party with firm principles, but not necessarily endorsing the whole of the LCR or USFI's program, history or theory.

I don't see a problem with that.

Anybody know if any trade unions have endorsed it? I'd heard rumours that a couple were considering it.

whats the point of forming a "tendency" when you can form a political party? Political parties have led revolutions, not factions of parties.

I guess that's why you support the minority in the FI. The majority is in favour of pluralism ie the rights of tendencies and caucuses.

Apologies for triple posting, but a huge impetus behind the new party was victory of the 2005 anti-EU vote which was overwhelming working class oriented, despite the SP and Greens.

From IV: http://www.internationalviewpoint.or...php?article801

Supporting the minority in the FI, as opposed to the majority, has /nothing/ to do with whether one supports the right to tendency and caucuses. The minority supports this as well. What I think is a better approximation of the division is whether we support /liquidating/ the historic program of Trotskyism in order to build these big centrist formations or not.

Do we build revolutionary Marxist currrents inside these parties or just become part of the undifferentiated mass? That's an important question. The method of the FI majority seems to lean towards making the building of broad electoralist parties the policy of the FI.

Read the proposed document for the World Congress - /Role and Tasks of the FI./ It advocates the building of all-inclusive parties. Look, I agree with you that the NPA is an important development, but the LCR liquidated itself with no perspective of building an internal tendency, no balance sheet draw by the members on the LCR experience and no way for comrades to connect with the FI except as individuals.
This, IMO, is an error and an attempt at a "get rich quick" scheme.

Supporting the minority in the FI, as opposed to the majority, has /nothing/ to do with whether one supports the right to tendency and caucuses. The minority supports this as well. What I think is a better approximation of the division is whether we support /liquidating/ the historic program of Trotskyism in order to build these big centrist formations or not.

Do we build revolutionary Marxist currrents inside these parties or just become part of the undifferentiated mass? That's an important question. The method of the FI majority seems to lean towards making the building of broad electoralist parties the policy of the FI.

Read the proposed document for the World Congress - /Role and Tasks of the FI./ It advocates the building of all-inclusive parties. Look, I agree with you that the NPA is an important development, but the LCR liquidated itself with no perspective of building an internal tendency, no balance sheet draw by the members on the LCR experience and no way for comrades to connect with the FI except as individuals.
This, IMO, is an error and an attempt at a "get rich quick" scheme.

This. I have nothing more to add

In fact we get now some petty attacks by NPA officers for not dissolving Gauche Revolutionaire ourselves. This is a worrying development, yet a logical extension from the mentality that we should all simply liquidate our organisations (and from this: factions, tendencies, platforms) to form an amorphous mass.

You may all be right. Everyone I know who has spent time in the LCR supports this and is hoping for the best. I'm hoping for the best, and if it fails, it will be learning experience. LO seems to have been able to maintain itself but its like kind of Rosicrucian mystery cult.

I guess I see two alternatives -- 1) The LCR just maintains itself as is and continues itself as more than a sect, but less than a viable political alternative or 2) builds some kind of United Front party in which it totally stacks the vote.

1) would probably be the better option -- which is what is being argued above -- and 2) would basically put the LCR into acting like the SWP re: the Socialist Alliance and RESPECT, what I'd call a bureacratic centralist socialism from below. Not healthy for anyone.

One of the strengths (and also a weakness) of the FI is that members are independently minded, considered to be able to think for themselves and not follow petty dictates. I think it was on this board that I came across the IMG described as ultra- or hyper- democratic which helped fuel its dissolution. That might have been true. From what I've been able to gather that actually just involved too too many meetings.

Do we build revolutionary Marxist currrents inside these parties or just become part of the undifferentiated mass? That's an important question. The method of the FI majority seems to lean towards making the building of broad electoralist parties the policy of the FI.

I just don't think that's true. Maybe in Mexico? OK. The Brazilian comrades seem to have done the right thing.

If you consider participation in the bourgeois political sphere wrong, then fine. I do a big chunk of my political work with anarchists and they do great stuff. If you do think it matters, then what's the alternative to building an authentically Left party of activists, including revolutionaries and reformists with different ideas?

Support for stupid crappy totally reformist parties at election time?

@ Blake There's nothing /principled/ that says we should abstain from the bourgeois political process. I work with anarchists sometimes as well. The point we start from is the uneven development of consciousness in the class.

Lenin's Left Wing Communism: an infantile disorder is really a masterpiece of strategic and tactical thinking. Of course, we should participate in elections-- in order to build our parties and to help win workers over to socialist ideas. It's part of how we build that bridge in consciousness that Trotsky talks about in the Transitional Program.

Mexico is one case -- the section split over support for the populist PRD. It was a disaster. The Brazilian case was also equally disasterous. The comrades were in a long-term entry in the Workers Party; one of the comrades took a post (Rosetto) in a multi-class government. It ended with the section split. Yes, some of the comrades did the right thing, but not all. Cannon made a point about entryism - that it can have a corrosive effect on your cadres if caried on too long.

This is not to mention the disasterous regroupments with Maoists in Spain and Germany which resulted in the loss of those comrades to our movement.

What I'm getting at here is this question of /broad/ versus cadre parties. I think there is an argument to be made in favor of building a broad formation, but I also think that the revolutionaries in these parties should have an organized current.

Again, I think participation in the NPA is a /tactical/ question. What we want to avoid is somehow allowing sectarianism or purism to separate us from the masses in struggle. The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly "Left" slogans. Lenin - Left Wing Communism

whats the point of forming a "tendency" when you can form a political party? Political parties have led revolutions, not factions of parties.

I would write an answer to this, but Red Philly pretty much answered it. I certainly think the NPA has potential, but listening to the french comrades report on the developments in the NPA was really like being thrown back and forth between hope and despair. However it is preciely this, this potential to build a mass revolutionary workers party why we must strive to push NPA towards such a direction. After all had there been no difficulties, then why would we need to be organized at all? The NPA has reached broad, if yet still relatively small,. layers of youth and workers, this is why Gauche Revolutionaire is needed in the NPA, and indeed a general revolutionary tendency.