By Pablo Vasco
From December 16-18, a week after the national congress of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, one of the main parties of the French far-left, there will also be the congress of the Revolutionary Communist Current, an organization which split from the NPA a year and a half ago. We present our critical opinion on the documents of the pre-congress of the CCR, in the context of the political challenges ahead for the French revolutionary left and the need for a new regroupment.
The CCR, better known by its website Permanent Revolution, is the national section of the Trotskyist Fraction for the Fourth International (FT-CI) led by the Argentine PTS. Incidentally, although it is called a fraction a differentiated part of a superior whole, it is striking that it calls itself a current circumscribed to itself.
The CCR parted ways with the NPA in June 2021 after launching a presidential candidate of its own[1], which gave the NPA leadership a pretext to split them and thus weaken the left wing. A year later, at a national conference, 104 delegates elected by 300 militants called to build “a new revolutionary organization, at the height of the urgency of ending the capitalist system and laying the foundations of a communist society”[2]. Its founding congress will be December 16-18. In the last two weeks, in the pre-congress assemblies, they report that 400 people participated between militants and observers[3].
Numbers aside, the first political problem is that if the CCR, instead of leaving the NPA prematurely, had remained to battle together with the other three left currents against the mistaken followership of the Mandelist leadership towards La France insoumise (LFI), as r, Anticapitalism and Revolution and Revolutionary Democracy have been doing, the relation of forces within the NPA today would be clearly in favor of the revolutionary sectors.
This is not a minor political option since the NPA, together with Lutte Ouvriere, both still in decline, are the two historic forces of the French far-left, which has always been a reference for all world Trotskyism. And an NPA as a wing “left of the institutional left”, that is of the LFI-NUPES of Mélenchon, is not the same as an NPA independent of this parliamentary reformism, inserted in the class struggle and with a revolutionary leadership and strategy. Especially if you really wantit , as the CCR says, to build an organization “up to the task of putting an end to the capitalist system and laying the foundations of a communist society” in an imperialist country such as France. Well, we believe that if this perspective receded it is largely due to the political responsibility of the CCR, which in a hasty, sectarian and self-proclaimed way prioritized building its group separately instead of building itself as part of a unitary and qualitatively superior revolutionary alternative.
What is the reality of the NPA today, whose most probable perspective is a split pushed by the leadership? Contrary to what the CCR-PTS lightly predicted in 2021 when it split, that “the left groupings of the NPA will end up in the most bitter impotence”[4], they grew and won new militants, as did for example L’Etincelle, which in addition to its union presence today leads the youth of the NPA. In the assemblies of the pre-congress of the NPA, which is being held now, from November 9 to 11, out of some 1,500 militants who voted, the platform of Mandelist officialdom won 48.3% of the votes, the united platform of the left 45.6% and the third centrist platform 6%. We insist: if the CCR had stayed, the left as a whole would have clearly won this congress and therefore the political leadership of the NPA.
Political problems
For its congress the CCR presents three texts – international, French and party -, on which we take a critical look here.
According to its international document[5], Russia “is not an imperialist power”. It is a characterization which we consider incorrect, from which they deduce a policy also mistaken towards the war in Ukraine. In other texts, the FT-CI does not even define Russia as a sub-imperialist country, but of “attenuated dependence”, of a “fundamentally subaltern condition”[6], i.e. they believe it to be rather similar to the great majority of countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America… although with somewhat more weapons.
In his work Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin made a factual description of these emerging powers, but without setting such characteristics as an inexorable condition. And of the three categories of countries indicated therein, imperialist, dependent and intermediate, Putin’s present Russia, in view of its power and its economic, military and geopolitical role as a whole[7], which is always more than the sum of its parts, far from being a dependent or subaltern country, is an imperialist power, oppressor of peoples in Eastern Europe.
That is why, following the example of Trotsky before the China-Japan war in 1937 and others similar, today a revolutionary position must combine the condemnation of the Russian invasion, the denunciation of NATO and the support to the Ukrainian armed resistance, with total political independence from the Zelensky government. Instead the RCC repeats the serious error of the entire FT-CI of completely denying the just war component of liberation or self-defense of Ukraine in the face of the invasion and, like all campism, in a posture functional to Putin claims that the victory of Ukraine would “strengthen Western imperialism”. A completely anti-Marxist analysis, which ignores that in the first place a defeat of Putin would invigorate and encourage to come out to fight for their rights not only the Ukrainian working people, but their Russian class brothers and sisters and those of all the republics and nationalities of the region for whom the concrete and direct oppressor empire is Russia.
Furthermore, the text of the CCR, which details minutely the superstructural and military variables of that conflict, and which exaggerates a distancing of Germany from the European Union in order to erect a new imperialist axis, speaks little about the class struggle in the world, nothing about the workers and youth vanguard, the feminist and ecologist struggles, the revolutionary left and barely dedicates a tiny 0.6% of its extensive space to the revolutionary process in Iran, which it minimizes as a simple “wave of revolts”.
Nor is there a Marxist characterization of whether the world situation is revolutionary, pre-revolutionary, non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. “A chaotic era,” they say vaguely, with “structural changes,” which “may lead to turning points in the class struggle.” And after recognizing that “increasingly important sectors of the working class” enter into struggle, in a few lines they enumerate the importance of the wage fight, of “a bold policy to break the conservative weight of the union bureaucracy” and that “it is urgent to address the construction of revolutionary parties with a clear strategic and programmatic orientation”. Thus, generalities. It seems that the CCR, as they say in France, “discovered hot water”?
The national text points to a worsening of the French economic and political crisis, two Bonapartist projects (Macron and Le Pen), a new neo-reformist mediation (NUPES), the following of the NPA and an advance of the struggles. Its program highlights the slogans of sliding scale of wages, indeterminate strike, plan of struggle and a radical democratic program against the authoritarian regime, but lacks any slogan of power to propagandize, such as a government of the workers. Another notorious omission is that there are no slogans either for the dissolution of NATO, nor against the European Union and its institutions, nor the alternative strategy of a European federation of socialist republics, a Europe of workers and peoples or similar.
While their party text includes a general phrase, “to always stand with the peoples oppressed by the imperialist powers and very particularly when it comes to French imperialism”, they omit elementary anti-imperialist demands such as the definitive independence of the overseas territories, the breaking of the pacts binding the former French colonies and the withdrawal of all French troops and military bases abroad (14 countries[8]).
Likewise, in this document the CCR proposes to “contribute to the construction of a revolutionary workers party capable of transforming revolts into revolution”. But then they only value their own recipes and accuse the left currents of the NPA of “fear” and of “betting on forms of conciliation with the leadership”. According to them, “according to the outcome of the NPA congress and the conclusions they draw, this debate could be reconsidered”….
If the CCR persists in navel-gazing with self-sufficiency, it will be a new Trotskyist sect of the kind that already abound in France and many other countries. If they truly want to “transform the revolts into revolution” they should not condition a frontist approach towards the other revolutionary currents, and propose either to advance towards a revolutionary party in common with freedom of tendencies, a front in the style of the Argentine FIT Unity or other variants. Not to do so is criminal. The dilemma is posed.
[1] In the end they could not run for the elections since the CCR only reached half the signatures that were legally required.
[3] https://www.revolutionpermanente.fr/Nouvelle-organisation-revolutionnaire-400-personnes-dans-les-AGs-pre-Congres-dans-toute-la-France
[4] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Francia-crisis-terminal-del-NPA-y-emergencia-de-una-nueva-corriente-revolucionaria
[5] https://www.revolutionpermanente.fr/La-guerre-en-Ukraine-et-l-acceleration-des-tendances-aux-crises-guerres-et-revolutions
[6] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Semiperiferias-Subimperialismos-Debates-sobre-el-imperialismo-hoy
[7] Largest country in the world, first energy power, first mineral power, second military power (with bases and tropos in other 15 countries), second nuclear power, 11th economy in the world and regional and global influence. It is one of the only countries with veto power in the Security Council of the UN.
[8] Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Gabon, Senegal, Chad, Niger, Antilles, Guyana, Polynesia, Réunion, New Caledonia and South Indian Ocean.