There’s a development taking place in France that has enormous
implications for a new left. The Revolutionary Communist League (LCR)
has announced that it is dissolving itself into a new formation, the New
Anti-capitalist Party (NPA). Twelve LCR leaders, including 1960s
veterans Daniel Bensaid, Alain Krivine, and Pierre Rousset, have
announced the LCR’s intention on International Viewpoint, an official
publication of the Fourth International long associated with the late
Ernest Mandel:
The NPA will be clearly defined politically. Its preliminary documents
set out some unmistakable terms: class struggle and support for all the
struggles of the exploited and oppressed; unity in action of workers and
their organizations; a break with the capitalist system; an
eco-socialist project; opposition to any policy of managing the
capitalist economy and the central executive powers of capitalist
institutions; the struggle for a workers’ government; the revolutionary
transformation of society; socialist democracy; and an internationalist
program and practice. To be sure, a number of questions will remain
open: the nature of revolutions in the 21st century; problems of the
transition to socialism; and a whole range of other questions having to
do with the reformulation of the socialist and communist project. But we
are not beginning from scratch; and the NPA will collectively determine
its own positions on the basis of new common experiences.
In other words, unlike practically every “Leninist” formation, the NPA
does not expect its members to defend a particular analysis of “the
Russian question”. In this respect, it has something in common with
Solidarity, a U.S. group that is made up of people who rejected a
mechanical “Bolshevik” approach at the time of their founding and are
happy to accept multiple interpretations of what the LCR called
“problems of transition to socialism”. Their founding document states:
Theoretically, some of us view these states as post-capitalist
societies whose transition toward socialism is blocked by bureaucratic
ruling castes and the pressures of imperialism. Others of us regard the
bureaucracies as ruling classes, exploiting the working class in a new
way, in a social formation which is a rival to capitalism but is no less
reactionary. Others of us regard them as essentially a new form of
capitalism itself, state capitalism; while still others do not have a
firmly held theory or regard all existing theoretical explanations as
inadequate.
We are determined that these differences will not prevent us from
extending active solidarity to workers’ struggles in Eastern Europe, nor
from building a common socialist organization here in the U.S.
For an interesting discussion of the LCR/NPA evolution, you can read Jim
Jepps’s interview with John Mullen, an activist in a small group in
France that agrees with Tony Cliff’s state capitalist analysis but has
no formal connection to the world movement he founded. Mullen, who has
joined the NPA, describes the kind of political diversity that will be
found there:
The only big organization 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 neo-liberalism. 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
“anti-capitalist” 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 Guevara’s 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.
Although Mullen is encouraged by this development, he does not quite get
what it is about:
To emphasize 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 there 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 SWP theories).
Here’s a safe prediction. Mullen’s “tiny group of comrades” will likely
remain tiny.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/from-the-lcr-to-the-npa/
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