Votes (CPN) : 4 in favor, 40 against, 2 abstentions, 0 NPPV (do not vote)
More than two years after the split-exclusion of the comrades who helped set up the NPA-R, this first congress should be a refounding congress. The leadership formed by the alliance between the two fractions AetR and L’Étincelle, in keeping with its refusal of any refounding congress, wants to make this its congress of affirmation of the NPA-R, continuity and overcoming of the NPA, making the failure of our fight against the split-exclusion an « unprecedented » opportunity.
The evolution of the comrades of AetR and L’Étincelle, who have disengaged from the politics in which they had participated with the Poutou campaign for a radical left and solidarity with the « Ukrainian resistance », and are preparing to merge, could be a step in the right direction, provided the method is changed. A top-down merger of the kind that has been taking place for the past two years, without any discussion open to all activists, without any possibility of understanding the differences they have overcome, and without any opportunity to share the experience they describe as unprecedented, does not carry any momentum for the revolutionary movement. It is part of a series of sectarian relations within the revolutionary movement, which are being reinforced at the very moment when the needs of the workers’ movement, in response to the impotence of the political and trade union left and the rise of the far right, require the building of unitary and democratic relationship.
A refounding congress of the NPA in 2022 would have been the only way to prevent what was, failing that, the split-exclusion. The various groups that rejected the policy of alliance with LFI – which began in 2020 during the municipal elections in Bordeaux, then for the regional elections of 2021 and the presidential campaign for a radical left before supporting the NUPES followed by rallying to the NFP – were unable to unite around a democratic and revolutionary orientation to form a new leadership.
After rejecting this policy and then refusing to split without giving themselves the means to do so, AetR and L’Étincelle have turned the split-exclusion into a supposed opportunity for the revolutionary movement and continue to refuse any refounding congress!
The enthusiasm surrounding the merging between A&R and L’Etincelle that prevails today turns a blind eye to the missed opportunities in the years leading up to and including the split-exclusion, when it would have been possible to act so that the left of the NPA could form an alternative leadership capable of preventing the explosion.
The page has been turned, and it’s up to us to change direction and define a policy for a democratic polepole of revolutionaries.
The aim of the congress should be to define what brings us together, delimit our differences and establish the framework and modalities of our collective work, something that the NPA-B had refused, wanting to provoke a split-exclusion. We all want to build a party that respects the right of tendencies and factions to express themselves freely. This is more than a right; it is the very condition for a policy aimed at building a pole of revolutionaries, an instrument for the democratic organization of the working people, for the construction of a party for the working class.
This brings us back to the discussion on the period and tasks, which has been put off until now, even when the principle was voted on in the NPA, a vote that was not followed up, even though it would have been the only way to prevent the splitting process from reaching its conclusion.
The main currents of the revolutionary movement, including Lutte Ouvrière, refuse to accept the idea that capitalism is undergoing a new phase in its development, that the « supreme » stage was not the « ultimate » stage. This idea is seen as a challenge to Lenin, to one of the constitutive foundations of each faction, which is based on the reduction of the revolutionary heritage to dogmas, each with its own interpretation and reading, reducing dialectical materialism, Marxism, to a mechanical or even metaphysical materialism.
The present is seen as a mere prolongation of the same phenomenon, « imperialism », in a different, « reconfigured » form, even if it means emptying Lenin’s historical conception of imperialism of its content, instead of appropriating his dialectical method to focus on defining the specificity of our epoch from the point of view of revolutionary prospects, i.e. the success at a higher level of what failed in the past.
The ability of the revolutionary movement to overcome its divisions and move towards a revolutionary workers’ party depends on its ability to think through the new period from a Marxist point of view, to define our tasks and refound ourselves.
This platform is situated in this perspective, independently of immediate questions of leadership, from the point of view of building the NPA-R as an instrument of a democratic and revolutionary pole, and more broadly from the point of view of the entire revolutionary movement, organized or not, its friends and sympathizers, with a view to working towards the liquidation of the old practices of self-construction and the political and organizational bases that perpetuate them.
It is based on the main facts of the new phase in the development of capitalism, and the economic, social and political upheavals that today form the basis of the revolutionary perspective and define our tasks: to combat sectarianism and opportunism within the revolutionary movement, which are the consequences and factors of its divisions, in order to overcome them and engage in a united dynamic towards the construction of a party that meets the needs of the period.
Capitalism from its supreme to its ultimate stage: the march to bankruptcy of globalized financial capitalism
Referring to the formation of imperialism, Lenin wrote: « What is essential from the economic point of view in this process is the substitution of capitalist monopolies for capitalist free competition […] At the same time, monopolies do not eliminate the free competition from which they arose; they exist above and beside it, thus generating contradictions, frictions, particularly acute and violent conflicts. »
These « contradictions, frictions and particularly acute and violent conflicts » have given rise, through « unequal and combined development », to globalized financial capitalism, which has replaced the imperialism described by Lenin. It has exacerbated the essential features of imperialism: parasitism, the over-exploitation of man and nature, globalized competition combined with the military struggle for control of raw materials and energy, markets and logistical routes.
To paraphrase Lenin, it can be summed up as capitalism at the stage of multinational corporations.
It was formed after the revolutionary wave of national emancipation struggles, through the liberal and imperialist offensive launched in the early 1980s to combat the fall in the rate of profit through privatization and the undermining of social gains, which led to the collapse of the USSR and the integration of the new capitalist states born of national liberation struggles – the emerging countries – into the world market and production.
The financialization of the economy has enabled the capitalist class to free itself from the constraints of national states and capitalist private property, by transforming the means of production and exchange into financial assets that are permanently traded on the world’s financial markets and stock exchanges.
A financial oligarchy appropriates and shares out the surplus value produced on a global scale.
Its stranglehold on the development of new technologies accentuates its parasitism.
The development of production and trade on a planetary scale generalizes the competition between workers, while at the same time developing the relationship of capitalist exploitation to an unprecedented level, and tending to ruin the achievements of the proletariat in the old imperialist powers. The concentration of immense wealth in a few hands has led to an unprecedented accentuation of inequalities.
It also globalizes competition between states, great powers, regional or local powers, without even the USA being able to claim to maintain any kind of stable balance in international relations.
Globalized financial capitalism is incapable of regulating itself.
It is in permanent crisis. The development of techniques is not matched by a development of production to satisfy the demands for financial profitability of the enormous mass of capital in search of surplus value.
Capitalists can only cope at the cost of a permanent war against wage earners and peoples, accentuating the relations of exploitation.
The contradictions inherent in the very workings of capitalism have continued their undermining work at a higher level, dragging the entire planet into its permanent crisis. They erupted in 2007-2008 in a great depression with global repercussions. Despite the measures taken by governments and central banks to keep the profit machine alive, the world economy has been plunged into a phase of stagnation ever since, the consequence of capitalism’s chronic illness, a major, globalized crisis of accumulation. Faced with a stagnating economy and stagnating profit rates, the system of production and exchange is unable to offer the masses of available capital sufficient opportunities for profitable investment. Increasing masses of unused capital are rushing into speculation and the debt industry, raising the threat of crashes and solvency crises with devastating consequences.
Capitalism can no longer integrate new non-capitalist territories in order to expand its market and production, and combat the downward trend in the rate of profit. Today, it is confronted by its globalization across the globe, aggravating the illness of the crisis of capital accumulation, which is reaching its ultimate economic, social, geographic and ecological limits.
The Trump-Musk election or the social, political, moral decomposition of the citadel of capitalism
The American elections of November 5, 2024 and their aftermath gave the whole world a glimpse of the decomposition undermining the world’s leading power from within. They brought Trump to the Presidency, immediately congratulated by the entire political staff of the world’s bourgeoisie and hailed by the stock markets. From the electoral accident of 2016, after 4 years of the Biden administration, in the service of Wall Street, Trump, after seizing the Republican party transformed into a far-right party, was brought to power by Musk-like billionaires dragging along the petty bourgeoisie but also by deflecting a dominated popular discontent alienated to the system. Kamala Harris couldn’t turn things around, symbolizing in Biden’s continuity the arrogance of the privileged classes with no other policy than the defense of Wall Street, the US military offensive and support to Israel.
The two Wall Street candidates ignored the worsening living conditions of workers and the working classes, the debt and stagnation, ultimately defending the same policies pursued since 1980 through the Great Depression of 2007-2008 and the Covid crisis.
The ruling class sought to emerge from the long economic depression with a series of massive bank bailouts and large subsidies, particularly under Biden. The US debt exploded to nearly $36,000 billion, social inequalities widened even further, and the crisis was postponed but at a higher level.
The concentration of wealth has reached absurd levels, with a minority controlling more wealth than the bottom half of the population. The wealth of American billionaires now exceeds 5,500 billion dollars, an increase of almost 90% since the start of the pandemic. Stock markets are exploding, while inflation is devouring real wages, making essential goods – from food to housing and health insurance – unaffordable for millions.
The working class faces layoffs, school closures and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse.
Both bourgeois parties have similarly ignored climate change, which is causing unprecedented ecological disasters, including two major hurricanes that have hit the US in the last two months, causing devastating floods.
Both are dedicated to America First politics, but the Democrats see themselves as the perpetrators of a bygone era, pretending to hold the two parties together to maintain order and prepare for war. This failed order is crumbling, and a large fraction of the American bourgeoisie sees in Trump’s populist, reactionary demagoguery the only way to maintain its decadent order, to declare war on the « enemy within » to better muzzle the working class weakened and divided by the threat of deportation of millions of immigrants whom the billionaires fear.
Trump is neither fascism nor Hitler, but a new fascism is in the making. It will not be that of an imperialist state fighting to conquer its vital space by force of arms, as imperialist Germany was, but that of the nation dominating the world and preparing for war to perpetuate its domination in order to satisfy the endless needs of capital accumulation, an imperative necessity if the system is not to collapse in on itself.
The populist dictatorship heralded by Trump’s election will have no need to attack America’s anti-democratic and corrupt bourgeois institutions, but will be able to content itself with subjecting them to its policies and using them to mobilize and organize the militias already at work in the shadow of the Republican Party.
Breaking this chain of events in the politics of capital does not depend on power struggles between the two parties of the ruling class, but solely on proletarian intervention on the social and political terrain. The aim of the congress should be to define what brings us together, delimit our differences and establish the framework and modalities of our collective work, something that the NPA-B had refused, wanting to provoke a split-exclusion. We all want to build a party that respects the right of tendencies and factions to express themselves freely. This is more than a right; it is the very condition for a policy aimed at building a pole of revolutionaries, an instrument for the democratic organization of the working people, for the construction of a party for the working class.
This brings us back to the discussion on the period and tasks, which has been put off until now, even when the principle was voted on in the NPA, a vote that was not followed up, even though it would have been the only way to prevent the splitting process from reaching its conclusion.
The main currents of the revolutionary movement, including Lutte Ouvrière, refuse to accept the idea that capitalism is undergoing a new phase in its development, that the « supreme » stage was not the « ultimate » stage. This idea is seen as a challenge to Lenin, to one of the constitutive foundations of each faction, which is based on the reduction of the revolutionary heritage to dogmas, each with its own interpretation and reading, reducing dialectical materialism, Marxism, to a mechanical or even metaphysical materialism.
The present is seen as a mere prolongation of the same phenomenon, « imperialism », in a different, « reconfigured » form, even if it means emptying Lenin’s historical conception of imperialism of its content, instead of appropriating his dialectical method to focus on defining the specificity of our epoch from the point of view of revolutionary prospects, i.e. the success at a higher level of what failed in the past.
The ability of the revolutionary movement to overcome its divisions and move towards a revolutionary workers’ party depends on its ability to think through the new period from a Marxist point of view, to define our tasks and refound ourselves.
This platform is situated in this perspective, independently of immediate questions of leadership, from the point of view of building the NPA-R as an instrument of a democratic and revolutionary pole, and more broadly from the point of view of the entire revolutionary movement, organized or not, its friends and sympathizers, with a view to working towards the liquidation of the old practices of self-construction and the political and organizational bases that perpetuate them.
It is based on the main facts of the new phase in the development of capitalism, and the economic, social and political upheavals that today form the basis of the revolutionary perspective and define our tasks: to combat sectarianism and opportunism within the revolutionary movement, which are the consequences and factors of its divisions, in order to overcome them and engage in a united dynamic towards the construction of a party that meets the needs of the period.
War, the weapon of the USA and Western powers in global competition to safeguard their outmoded dominance
Financialized capitalism is the product of a profound transformation of the economy brought about by geostrategic upheavals following the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of new capitalist powers which, born of national liberation struggles, have integrated into the global capitalist market, of which they have become major players. The most important of these are grouped together in the Brics, a heterogeneous bloc of capitalist dictatorships eager to carve out a place for themselves against the old imperialist powers, and through the rivalries that pit them against each other. Putin’s aggression against Ukraine in response to the US/NATO offensive is an illustration of such processes.
The hegemony of the USA is now under threat, as the trend towards economic stagnation intensifies. Protectionist policies, primarily those of the USA in its economic war against China, or its policy of sanctions against its enemies such as Iran and Russia, or even against EU countries, are exacerbating competition.
The complement to this globalized competition is the rise of militarism, war being an economic weapon in the relations between capitalist powers, the pursuit of competition by other means.
In some so-called developing countries, in Africa but also elsewhere, armed gangs wage war against each other for power and access to the trough of agreements with the big multinationals plundering their resources. Today, there are more intra-state wars of this kind than inter-state wars such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In the latter, the primary war-makers are the United States and its European vassals, whose armed force is NATO, ready to commit any crime to ensure free access to resources and markets for their multinationals, and to guarantee the security of logistical and communication routes.
Not blaming the USA, Nato or France for their proxy war against Russia, or for Israel’s war in the Middle East, is a form of participation in official opinion, or at the very least a concession to it. The enemy is in our own country. Not one euro for their wars!
A democratic peace that respects the right of peoples to self-determination can only be the work of workers, of the exploited across borders, of their fraternization, through revolutionary struggle for the defeat and overthrow of their own bourgeoisie and the conquest of power for socialism. In response to the dead-end of nationalism, we are acting for a socialist federation of the peoples of the Middle East.
Trump’s claims to impose peace are a bluff, or at best an attempt to negotiate the balance of power as it emerges after two years of US proxy war against Russia and on the Middle East front.
In reality, the world is engaged in a globalization of war, waged both by the old Western powers in an attempt to preserve their outdated domination, and by the new capitalist powers, dictatorships large and small, fighting for the appropriation of wealth and markets.
This is not to predict a third world war of the same nature as the wars of 1914 or 1940 between Western powers for the repartition of the world and its leadership. Such a hypothesis is unlikely in the age of nuclear war and a multipolar world. There will be no super-imperialism capable of imposing itself and regulating capitalist chaos.
The rise of militarism leads to increasing authoritarianism, to bend the proletariat and populations to the ambitions of states and the various fractions of globalized capital. On this path, Netanyahu and Zelensky have made themselves zealous propagandists of Western militarism in the service of perpetuating the age-old domination of the old imperialist powers over the world, from which they themselves reap the dividends.
The march towards populist dictatorships is gathering pace in Europe and the USA, via France. It is fueled by propaganda in favor of war with Israel and Ukraine, or trade war with China, in preparation for a military offensive, in the name of defending « our values », those of the capitalist West shaped by colonialism and imperialism.
France’s political and social crisis, the collapse of bourgeois democracy, part of the crisis of the old Western imperialist powers
In France, from the discrediting of the right and left, who had cohabited or succeeded each other in government to lead the offensive of the ruling classes against the world of work, to the rise of the far right, via Macron’s neither right nor left, there is continuity in the discrediting of parliamentary parties and bourgeois parliamentary democracy, the docile instrument of capital’s politics.
The process of political crisis is underpinned by the process of economic and social regression, and is the direct consequence of the constant accentuation of inequalities, which can also be seen at the level of the European Union, particularly in Germany, which until now appeared to be a stabilizing element, now undermined by the development of the extreme right.
The mechanism of imperialist surplus-profits described by Lenin, which enabled the bourgeoisie of the old Western powers to contain, with the collaboration of social-democracy, the revolutionary upsurge of 1917 and then that of the aftermath of the Second World War, has exhausted its possibilities. The integration of the former colonial countries into the world market, in competition with the old imperialist countries, and the globalization of the labor market, with the proletarians of all countries pitted against each other, has accelerated the parasitic concentration of capital to the detriment of the entire population of the globe, at the cost of ever-greater exploitation to lower the cost of labor.
Xenophobic demagoguery against immigration is much more than a racist perversion designed to divide the working class; it is the expression of the bourgeoisie’s fear of the new proletariat, in which migrants are revolutionary actors simply because they are a factor in breaking the national consensus in which the left fully participates.
The long depressive phase into which capitalism has entered explains the collapse of the old parties that emerged from the history of the workers’ movement, the PS and the PC, which have long since disavowed their origins. Reformism, whether social-democratic or Stalinist, which had only been able to maintain itself because the existence of surplus profits allowed a few concessions to the working classes of Western countries, had no choice but to participate in the management of the liberal and imperialist offensive of the end of the last century to discredit itself, completely powerless to provide the slightest response to social regression, its nationalist demagogy paving the way and giving way to the xenophobic policies of the extreme right.
Reformism no longer has any material basis. The left is condemned to negotiate setbacks and concessions, in order to give up any reformist aspirations and join the national consensus.
LFI is trying to preserve its political independence at the cost of great confusion and a permanent internal crisis. As the futureless by-product of the decomposition of the governmental left and the failure of a fraction of the revolutionary movement, it remains dependent on the PS and the parliamentary left, without which Mélenchon cannot imagine realizing his dream of becoming president.
The collapse of the left leaves the way clear for reactionary forces, the far right and even a new kind of fascism and populist dictatorship, to which the economic, social and political forces at work will lead in the more or less long term.
The current ecological catastrophe, an expression of the system’s global crisis and the need for a planned economy
The ecological crisis, whose ravages are affecting all the planet’s populations, especially the poorest, is the global manifestation of the headlong rush of the capitalist classes, panicked by the coming crash, their bankruptcy.
Globalized financial capitalism is desperate to push back its limits by overexploiting man and nature on a planetary scale.
Here too, the ruling classes and governments have lost control. From one COP to the next, governments display their powerlessness, while trying to give the impression that they care through increasingly ridiculous budgetary measures, when they don’t turn a blind eye to the ongoing catastrophe, as they did during the American presidential campaign. And when, in the name of green capitalism, they don’t subsidize the multinationals that reign over fossil fuels.
In its march to bankruptcy, capitalism has also crossed the boundary beyond which natural ecological regulation mechanisms can no longer counterbalance the runaway pace of productivism.
Capitalist globalization is depleting natural resources and creating a climatic and ecological crisis that both capital and states are incapable of coping with, because they are prisoners of the dictatorship of capitalist property, competition and war, and of the national borders that guarantee their privileges.
In order to rationalize the production and exchange of goods useful to humanity, we need to expropriate capitalist property and plan the global economy based on its internationalization and socialization, as well as new technologies, to put them at the service of society as a whole, while respecting reconciled man and nature.
Despite the crisis of the revolutionary project, the beginnings of a global revolutionary transformation have never been so ripe in history.
As Lenin wrote of the imperialist stage in the development of capitalism, globalized financial capitalism carries in its flanks a new world economic order. The failures of past revolutions do not call this idea into question. As Marx put it, communism is the real movement to abolish the established capitalist order. It has culminated in a new stage in the development of capitalism, through which the premises, the objective and subjective conditions, for a world revolution have matured, giving Lenin’s idea a new, richer, broader content.
The failure of past revolutions is not the failure of scientific socialism or Marxism, but the expression of the immaturity of societal development.
Until the collapse of the USSR, the workers’ movement experienced the first long phase of its history, which profoundly changed the world through a revolutionary process, demonstrating its ability to conquer power to change society, without yet having the strength to see the work through to the end, leaving power to capital and its destructive work.
If reactionary forces have had the upper hand, this cannot be explained by human shortcomings alone, or even betrayals and denials. They are themselves the expression of social pressures, of the balance of power between classes which, in the final analysis, results from relations in production and exchange, where material wealth is produced.
People make their own history on terrain they have not chosen. Since the proletariat asserted itself as a revolutionary class in the revolution of 1848, it has accumulated a wealth of experience, of which Marxism is the product. 1871, the Paris Commune, then 1917 and the revolutionary wave are the milestones in the history of class struggles through which the proletariat, through both its work and its political activity, has worked to ripen the conditions for the globalized revolutionary transformation of society. The conditions of existence determine human consciousness at the same time as the latter becomes an actor in the transformation of society. Objective and subjective conditions, including the formation of a revolutionary workers’ party, are inextricably linked at the heart of the dialectic of class struggle, with its ups and downs…
The development of the workers’ movement led to a retreat from the Marxism caricatured by the Stalinist dictatorships and the leaders of the nationalist dictatorships of the former colonial countries, who had usurped the flag of communism to better fool the masses. The crisis of the proletariat’s leadership has given way to a crisis of the revolutionary project itself, from which we cannot escape.
This is the major question that defines our tasks today.
Answering this question means taking into account the other essential characteristic of the period, which breaks the long decades of retreat: never in history have the objective and subjective conditions for a worldwide revolutionary transformation been so developed in inverse proportion to the bankruptcy of capitalism.
Globalization, the formation of an integrated world economy, accentuates the two main contradictions of capitalism: on the one hand, the socialization of production and exchange, and on the other, private property and the national state; and between the limitless development of production and the limits of the market, consumption limited by the maintenance of mass misery. The crises of over-production and over-accumulation of capital feed off each other.
In these transformations, the technological revolution occupies a place that some compare to the invention of the printing press as an instrument of communication between people and of culture, democracy and the collective management of social life.
For the first time in history, humanity is sharing information, knowledge, social and economic life, culture and politics in real time.
The dominant classes concentrate this immense progress in their own hands, turning it into an instrument of enslavement and driving the world into a mad race to the abyss.
The result is a new upsurge in class, social and democratic struggles to regulate the economy according to social needs and respect for the environment – in other words, the struggle for socialism and communism, the only way out for mankind.
The theory of permanent revolution, « the question of the character, internal links and methods of international revolution in general », and « the transition program, the task of which consists in systematically mobilizing the masses for proletarian revolution » are our compasses.
The transitional approach formulated in the Transitional Program, too often reduced to transitional demands, today takes on its full revolutionary scope by formulating and building the link between all social, democratic and ecological issues and the struggle to win power, the struggle for socialism and communism.
The brutal transformation of the working and living conditions of millions of proletarians around the world, their deterioration under the pressure of ferocious exploitation that is all the more unacceptable when technical progress should make it possible to put an end to it, are shaping anti-capitalist awareness, profound revolt and multiple struggles, all of which are grounds for revolutionary action to ensure that these developments mature a class consciousness, an awareness of the necessity and possibility of changing the world.
The pace of this evolution is difficult to predict. The struggle, on an international scale and at the heart of the old imperialist powers, between a mode of production based on private property, profit and capitalist competition – outmoded for decades already – and a new way of producing and exchanging, based on cooperation and planning according to human needs and ecological necessities, defines the content of the period.
The conditions for building a revolutionary workers’ party
The party for the emancipation of workers by themselves is not born of the will of an avant-garde, of a minority holding revolutionary knowledge, but is formed through a process of self-organization, of awareness-raising, of organization in which this minority is both a product and an actor, an amplifier, when social and political evolutions push the masses to seize the ideas of their own emancipation.
Our project is not to « build on what we already are to construct the party we want », as comrades from AetR and L’Etincelle put it. Such an approach defines the understanding of a sect that considers itself to be the alpha and omega of the situation, not of a Marxist current. We don’t start from ourselves or from a party model, but from the level of consciousness of the working world, its organization, the revolutionary movement in which we are actors, the data of the historical period, the possibilities it opens up, the accumulated experience of the workers’ movement, far from myths and dogmas. We don’t see ourselves as a small party called upon to grow!
We are working collectively to develop a strategy and a policy for the revolutionary movement and the working class, based on the movement as it is, without incantation or self-proclamation.
The new phase in the development of capitalism, the ultimate phase of a capitalism on its breaking point, is opening up a new phase in the development of the workers’ movement, confronted with the global crisis of globalized capitalism, the ground for a mass anti-capitalist awareness that the system no longer works, and that we need to radically change the way people produce and trade to satisfy their collective and individual needs.
This alternative lies at the heart of the contradictions that undermine the system, and is part of the history of emancipation struggles. Its material foundations have been strengthened, and its objective and subjective beginnings have matured with the development of a new world proletariat, the product of capitalist globalization.
A unified policy for a revolutionary democratic pole
It is through this struggle that the new generation is formed, the driving force behind the party of the coming revolution. The democratic and revolutionary perspectives of the workers’ movement draw their strength from the power of the new proletariat that embodies it, as well as from its history and accumulated experience, a source of inspiration and internationalist class culture for lively action.
Over the years, in the absence of a revolutionary policy within a workers’ movement dominated by political and trade union apparatuses, the revolution has taken on the content of a proclamation, and the party, that of self-proclaimed groups confusing their own lives with those of the workers’ movement, deluding themselves about their ability to give birth to a mass party, or even an international, through their own development or in association with other groups.
A democratic refoundation of the revolutionary movement is needed, a refoundation that requires, to borrow Gramsci’s phrase, « critical self-consciousness », which begins with an awareness of the mess our own history of exclusions, splits and sectarianism represents, mechanically feeding opportunism and vice versa.
The split-exclusion-explosion of the NPA is a deplorable illustration of this logic of failure.
Our first task is to break with it, by inscribing our policy in the transformations underway as a result of the increasing decomposition of capitalism.
Today, the renewal of the revolutionary workers’ movement is in gestation at the heart of the chronic crisis, the march to bankruptcy of globalized financialized capitalism, which makes the social and political integration of the proletariat and its organizations into the bourgeois world and the nation impossible other than by their capitulation. The class struggle brings with it the emergence of new working-class parties, simply because the conditions of capitalism’s decadent phase on the road to collapse leave no other possibility than a class confrontation.
The period ushered in by the 2007-2008 crisis and the Arab revolts of 2011 is one of globalized confrontation between the financial oligarchy seeking to dominate the world, and the globalized proletariat in all its rich diversity, seeking to impose a new way of producing and exchanging, by liquidating capitalist property and setting up a mode of production and exchange based on democratic, socialist world planning. Women in struggle against capitalist and patriarchal oppression are a driving force behind the emancipation of the proletariat, as are young people, and migrants are powerful revolutionary factors, breaking with national prejudices.
The starting axiom for any policy of refounding the revolutionary movement is to consider that revolutionaries have no interests that differ from those of the movement as a whole, and that the different tendencies that make up the movement are currents of the same party that should have no other aim than to represent the general interests of the movement as well as those of the workers in a unitary and democratic policy.
The fight for working-class unity against reactionary forces means fighting for the unity of the forces of Marxism, to unify the activists of the different revolutionary fractions, to link the different local groups together, particularly at the level of local intervention, to bring together within the same organizational framework all those who want to lead the battle for social and democratic rights, to fight against war and for socialism and communism, and therefore see themselves as members of the same party.
This is what is needed by those who wish to take part in the birth of a mass movement to challenge capitalism, who feel and are aware that they are taking part in a collective movement for emancipation, in the emergence of a new international revolutionary movement, which responds as much to the needs of humanity, to a historical necessity inscribed in the evolution of human societies, as to their own human needs for freedom, solidarity, to take part in a collective struggle, to make history.
To contact us: iufferte@gmail.com ; lpero33@gmail.com
Texts of platforms
- Platform 1 : For a world without borders and bosses, urgent revolution! Building the NPA-R as a tool for a pole of revolutionaries
- Plateform 2
- Plateform 3