There's been surprisingly little discussion in the UK on the launching of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste or NPA) over the water in France. I thought I'd take a look at this interesting and significant new development and so I spoke to John Mullen, the editor of Socialisme International, to see if I could find out more.
You recently attended the French launch of the "New Anti-Capitalist Party". How did it go?
The official founding conference will be in January 2009. For the moment there are 400 “committees for a new anti-capitalist party” all over France. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) was the force which proposed and coordinated the foundation, and will dissolve itself into it in a couple of months time. I attended the November national delegate meeting as one of the delegates for my town.
The meeting was very encouraging. The new party initiative is obviously attracting a lot of people, many of them young, others are experienced union activists, mostly (apart from the LCR members) people who have not been in a party as such before. Obviously for the moment, there is quite a lot of concentration on the preparation of a programme to be voted at the founding conference. Nevertheless many committees have been active in campaigning on the issue of the financial crisis, defending schools and universities against budget cuts, defending illegal immigrants against expulsions and so on.
Four-hundred committees seems like an impressive number of groups for an organisation that hasn't even been launched yet. How do these committees operate? How large are they, for instance would you have more than one in a town? Essentially are they the new party in waiting or are they the campaign for the new party?
It is impressive. In Montpellier, a day-long regional meeting got 2000 people to it, a similar regional meeting in Marseilles got 1500, other towns had huge meetings. National commission meetings on ecology, on politics in working-class neighbourhoods and so on have produced wide debates and proposals. Essentially the committees are already the new party in embryo – every week there is a national political leaflet given out in almost all the towns. But the committees also have a lot of autonomy. In one town there will be a public meeting on the financial crisis, in another a symbolic invasion on the local hypermarket to protest against the government's refusal to raise the minimum wage. The LCR already had very much a federal sort of organisation (for better and worse), and this will no doubt continue.
But the party-in-embryo does not yet have a regular publication, an essential element for a campaigning party. Nor does it yet have a proper financial structure, though plans have been made for subs based on income. There is a website, and a weekly paper should be set up two months after the founding conference.
So what's the thinking behind the new organisation? After all, even more than the UK, there's no shortage of left-wing groupings.
The massive strike waves and political movements of the last few years have shown that there are many, many people in France who would like to build a political alternative on the radical left. Olivier Besancenot, the spokesperson of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has recently had significantly higher popularity ratings than Sarkozy or his prime minister, Fillon. But this widespread sympathy for radical left ideas has not led people to join far-left parties to anything like the extent one might think. And the Socialist and Communist parties are generally identified as “the parties who don't change much when they're in government”, even if the Socialist Party has not yet been fully converted to Blairism.
The New Anti-capitalist Party was called for by the LCR (and the LCR will be dissolving and merging with it). The idea was a party which is based on struggle, where elections are secondary, but which does not ask members to all identify with a specific revolutionary or Trotskyist position.~ more... ~
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