Votes (CPN) : 1 in favor, 40 against, 5 abstentions, 0 NPPV (do not vote)
Contents
- 1) International situation: a world in crisis, more dangerous and more polarized
- i) A new stage in the international class struggle
- ii) Objective conditions, subjective conditions
- iii) The war in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine and the return of the national question
- iv) The crisis of bourgeois democracy and the rise of the far right
- v) Global anti-capitalist struggles and the need to transform revolts into revolutions
- 2) National situation: The political crisis, the Macron government’s shift to the right-wingization and the polarization of class struggle in France
- i) A deep political, economic and democratic crisis in France
- ii) The crisis of the Fifth Republic political system and the democratic demands of revolutionaries
- iii) Macron’s right-wing government and the rise of the far right
- iv) The New Popular Front and the institutional impasse of the political and trade union left
- v) Polarization in the class struggle and the need for a revolutionary party
- 3) Party: critically moving beyond the NPA experience
- i) The NPA split and the capitulation of the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste
- ii) Problems and challenges for NPA-Révolutionnaires
- iii) The “unprecedented merging” of the two majority tendencies and the danger of becoming a small version of Lutte Ouvrière
- iv) A party for action with a strategy of global revolutionary political struggle
Introduction:
The first congress of the NPA-Révolutionnaires is taking place in an upsetting international context. The economic crisis, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, Trump’s return to power, the weakening of bourgeois democracy, the rise of the far right, the disaster in Valencia and the international environmental crisis are all part of the explosive cocktail that capitalism offers us on a daily basis. The international situation is characterized by a manifold crisis in all fields (economy, geopolitics, ecology), but also by the growing polarization and asymmetry of the class struggle. The unbearable experience that capitalist exploitation imposes on millions of people around the world is spurring revolts of workers, of the exploited and the oppressed against capitalist oppression.
We have entered a new stage in the international class struggle. The 21st century presents us with a new set of political problems that deserve our full attention. This new stage is characterized by a tendency towards imbalance and instability. The conjuncture is reactionary, but the reversibility of the class struggle could open the way to new revolutionary situations. Against this backdrop, it’s important to reopen the strategic debate, very much topical, in order to overcome the crisis of alternatives, deepen our assessment of the twentieth century and rethink our own project of socialist revolution for the period ahead.
Domestically, the sequence opened since 2016 with the mobilizations against the Labour Law, followed by the Yellow Jacket movement and the two national strikes for pensions (to name only the most striking events), which have constituted a period of constant mobilization and confrontation with the capitalist system. The current political crisis is characterized by the weakening of the political center of bourgeois democracy, the crisis of the Fifth Republic regime, the treachery of the trade union leaderships, the reorganization of reformist forces, the shift to the right of Macron’s government and the rise of the far right. We are faced with growing instability, with a tougher government that directly attacks workers, including with authoritarian and anti-democratic moves. In this context of employers’ offensive and growing combativeness of our social class, the weakening of revolutionary forces and the breaking up of our own party into several pieces is paradoxical. The NPA split was clearly a setback, and we all fought to prevent it. But it’s also true that this crisis offers opportunities, if we can identify the reasons for the failure of the NPA’s founding project, to rethink a new project for our revolutionary organization.
In this context, the discussion at this congress begins with the need to assess the NPA’s experience, to understand the issues at stake and the problems we face, so that we can critically move beyond the experience of our own organization. This assessment is essential if we are to launch the construction of the NPA-Révolutionnaires on new programmatic and strategic foundations.
It’s not a question of holding, as the comrades in the majority are proposing, a congress of “two-thirds assessment and one-third orientation”, a congress to celebrate “the unprecedented merging”, a congress of “internal organizational restructuring” or even a congress to validate the “new leadership” in an administrative manner. We cannot be content to pursue an “acritical continuity” of the NPA, with cosmetic amendments to the broad party project of 2009, without drawing any lessons from experience. Nor is it a question of breaking with the organization in which we have been active for years, and which has positive aspects to be claimed and maintained.
That’s why, for us, the issue at stake at this congress is neither a break nor continuity, but rather the need to draw up a complete, democratic and collective balance sheet, in order to critically move beyond the NPA’s experience, to enable the refoundation of the NPA-Révolutionnaires on new programmatic bases and on strategic premises in line with the new stage of the class struggle we are currently experiencing.
1) International situation: a world in crisis, more dangerous and more polarized.
i) A new stage in the international class struggle
Shocking events in the international situation confirm that we have entered a new stage of class struggle. Our general definition is that we are in a new global stage of class struggle, tending towards imbalance and instability. We can say that this new stage began with the 2008 crisis (to mention a structural element). It includes the possibility of a new era of crises, wars, revolutions, barbarism and reaction.
To put it simply: the trend towards stabilization that we experienced in the last decades of the 20th century with capitalist globalization (the neoliberal counter-offensive, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the bipolar world, the unchallenged hegemony of the United States, etc.) has been reversed. The current trend is one of permanent imbalance, with bloody events, rebellions, causes of emancipation and wars, as in Palestine and Ukraine. The international context is marked by a growing imbalance in all areas.
This imbalance is expressed in the field of class struggle by elements of “bipolarity”, i.e., by a growing “polarization” both between states and in the struggle between classes. In the relationship between states, a multipolarity or a new bipolarity is tending to form between Western imperialism and emerging powers such as China and Russia. We do not share the skeptical view (adopted by the 2018 SU-QI congress) of “disorder” or “chaos” in the international situation. This definition remains descriptive without observing ongoing trends that may lead to tilt in one direction or another. It’s a definition that doesn’t prepare us for action.
Twenty-first century capitalism presents us with the panorama of a more polarized world, with a tendency towards imbalance. Added to this is the crisis of bourgeois democracy, the rise of the far right and the trend towards extremes. The trend is to move from words to deeds. We have entered “another world”, with the environmental crisis threatening to destroy the planet’s equilibrium, the covid 19 pandemic, debates on artificial intelligence and the private conquest of space. The nuclear threat reappears in the discussion, as do inter-imperialist competition, the colonial problem, the return of militarism, the march to war and humanity’s potential for self-destruction, all of which are symptomatic of this new international stage.
The new stage begins with a reactionary conjuncture. Trump’s victory confirms this trend towards the electoral rise of the far right internationally. However, reactionary capitalist attacks could also lead to rebounds on the left and prepare the ground for the eruption of new revolutions.
ii) Objective conditions, subjective conditions
Today’s working class is massive, heterogeneous and diverse as never before in history, but this does not mean that subjective conditions are ripe for socialist revolution. Today’s working class is exploited, in conditions of extreme job insecurity. It suffers from attacks that threaten to roll back the clock on working conditions, through phenomena such as uberization and counter-reforms.
In subjective terms, we see the fall of the Berlin Wall as having opened the way, in historical terms, for a “new beginning”, for a “new experience” in the class struggle of new generations, freed from the obstacle that Stalinism represented for the development of revolutionary experience. However, this new beginning, which opens up the potential for re-launching the revolutionary perspective, is taking place against the backdrop of a reactionary offensive and a continuing crisis of political alternatives.
Today, we are witnessing fights, confrontations and radicalized processes of class struggle. The three cycles of popular revolt in recent decades (Latin America in the early 2000s, the Arab Spring between 2010 and 2012, and the wave of international revolts in 2019) show that possibilities exist and that history is far from over. Revolt processes involve a radicalized confrontation with regimes and a shift in political affairs “from the palace to the square”, i.e., from institutions to direct confrontation in the streets.
So far, the revolt processes of the 21st century have not led to the overthrow of the capitalist system and the opening up of the path to socialist transition, even if several governments have fallen through the force of social mobilization. In general, today’s most advanced social movements are able to act independently, develop frameworks for self-organization and develop a certain anti-capitalist or anti-system consciousness. They are also accumulating experience, creating mirror effects between different movements and countries, and learning from experience. In this sense, recent years have seen the development of major international movements for feminism, anti-racism, ecology, youth and, more recently, solidarity against the war and genocide in Palestine.
But the transition from revolt to revolution is not automatic. Although there is a certain anti-capitalist consciousness in mobilizations, it does not yet become a revolutionary communist or socialist consciousness. In most movements, the working class is unable to place itself at the center of events, with its political and trade union parties and organizations. As a result, in many countries (France is perhaps an exception to the general trend) there is a historical break in revolutionary experience between generations, which is why it is necessary to rediscover the thread of historical continuity. For example, the recomposition of the working class in the U.S., a highly progressive phenomenon that fits this characterization of historical recommencement, seeks references from previous generations, for lack of continuity.
All this points to the need to build revolutionary parties capable of intervening in mobilization processes, taking into account the globality of political problems. Revolutionary parties capable of evaluating the experience of the twentieth century are needed, assessing Stalinism and bureaucratization, to overcome the crisis of alternatives, fragmentation, depoliticization and rejection of the party form.
Today’s global polarization could reopen the door to an upsurge in class struggle and the emergence of pre-revolutionary situations. These tasks of preparation and strategic debate, in the heat of the struggle, are the order of the day for revolutionaries in the current period.
iii) The war in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine and the return of the national question
The current world situation is marked by the return of imperialist war. The geopolitical element is one of the main preoccupations of the world situation at present, with the dispute between the United States, with its Western allies, and new imperialisms gaining momentum in China and Russia.
As regards the question of war and the causes of national emancipation, we note the existence of two open processes in Ukraine and Palestine, which are evolving daily, particularly at the moment with the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon and the threat of a war that could spread to the entire Middle East region.
With regard to the war in Ukraine, we offer the following question as a contribution to the debate: in our view, the war in Ukraine is the superimposition of two conflicts. This is the first characterization we wrote at the start of the war. It is a cause of national emancipation of the Ukrainian people against Russian invasion, as well as an inter-imperialist conflict, a proxy war, between Western imperialism and Russia. We characterize Russia as an imperialism under construction, not equivalent to Western imperialism, but as a capitalist power vying for its sphere of influence. With the development of the war and the instrumentalization of Ukrainian resistance by Zelensky and NATO, the element of legitimate national emancipation has been less evident than the inter-imperialist conflict. From this point of view, we do not share the position of those currents calling for arms to be sent to Ukraine, nor of those who see no capitalist restoration in Russia (according to the two extremes of positions within the Trotskyist movement on Ukraine).
We would like to add another element that we feel is important, namely the record of Stalinism in the Ukraine. Indeed, we feel it is necessary to take into account the “Holodomor” and the relations between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples on a historical level, in order to formulate a revolutionary policy. This element seems to us to be a strategic key to thinking about revolutionary politics in the context of the war in Ukraine, which is virtually absent in the elaboration of many revolutionary currents on the question.
With regard to the war in the Middle East, we are in favor of unconditional support for the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, against the Zionist war of Netanyahu’s far-right government, and for a free, secular, single, socialist Palestine, where all peoples can coexist in peace.
For the Palestinian people, this is not a conflict that began on October 7, 2023. Of course, May 15, 1948 marks the beginning of the Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic) for the Palestinians. On that day, the British authorities withdrew from Palestine to make way for the two-state solution (one Arab, one Jewish) decided by the major powers and validated by the UN, despite the opposition of all the Arab countries in the region. The history that followed that day is well known. The State of Israel won the war against the Arab states, and this marked the beginning of a long process of colonization, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Arab population by the Zionist state.
Today, 76 years later, the Netanyahu government is waging a genocidal offensive on the Gaza Strip, and moving to extend the war to the whole region. Western governments, like that of Biden and company, are complicit in the genocide. For its part, the Macron government is repressing any action of solidarity of those fighting in France to stop the massacre.
Since last year, student youth have led the way in mobilizing in support of the Palestinian people. Students at Columbia University in the U.S. have launched a worldwide movement of encampments, a “student intifada” in colleges, to express their solidarity with the Palestinians. In France, general assemblies, occupations and rallies took place at the Sorbonne, Tolbiac, Sciences Po, Paris 4, Paris 8 and many regional Sciences Po headquarters. Youth mobilization spread to the four corners of the globe. In Latin America, encampments and actions took place in the universities of Costa Rica, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, with the participation of our comrades from the student collective “Ya Basta!’’.
Despite mobilizations and international pressure, from condemnation of the terrorists to support for the Palestinian people against genocide, attacks continue in Palestine and Netanyahu spreads his war in the region, notably in Lebanon. However, the cause of the Palestinian people is still an important element in the global situation. It is not insignificant that sectors of the American population have decided not to vote for the Democratic Party in the face of the lack of clarity on the question of a weapon embargo or a ceasefire. The mobilization succeeded in instilling in the consciousness of large sectors of the population the importance of supporting the Palestinian people. The symbolic resolutions of the International Criminal Court are insufficient, but they do express the limits of unconditional support for Israel in the genocide of Palestine.
We support the demand for a ceasefire as an immediate measure, and we demand the program of a secular, socialist Palestine that will be possible only through the work of its own organized people. We share neither the methods nor the program of Hamas, and we give no political support to this organization. The same goes for Fatah, which is seen as a traitor that has given Israel air and set back the demands of the Palestinian people through its policy of concessions.
We regard as a political error the position of the majority of our party, which refused to call for an immediate ceasefire after Netanyahu’s military advance, out of concern for demarcation with the reformists. We are opposed to sectarian reflections in the revolutionary movement that place us outside of the international solidarity movement. Unlike our Lutte Ouvrière comrades, we proudly raise the Palestinian flag as a symbol of global anti-imperialist resistance. In this sense, we do not share the “no Hamas, no Netanyahu” positions that equate the oppressed with the oppressors. In the same way, we cannot join the struggle of the Palestinian people to the support of Hamas, a perspective that disarms mobilizations and emancipatory perspectives.
The wars currently under way demonstrate the importance of the national question and anti-imperialist struggles in the 21st century. This is an obvious point that most of the groups attending the Milan conference reject. We support the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination. The international struggle against imperialist war is one of the main tasks on the agenda in the current international situation.
iv) The crisis of bourgeois democracy and the rise of the far right
The dominant feature of the international situation. The arrival in power of several far-right governments at the international level seems to be the solution of choice for a sector of big capitalists, in this more dangerous and polarized world in crisis. Trump’s recent election victory in the world’s leading power will aggravate trends towards imbalances, as well as economic geopolitical conflicts and the deepening of genocide and war in Palestine. This victory will also encourage Milei, Orban, Meloni, Le Pen and others in their plans for reactionary, anti-social governments.
The far right of our time constitutes what some analysts characterize as “illiberal regimes”. In other words, regimes that attack fundamental rights and a rational vision of the world. Today’s far right is an assault on reason, a counter-revolutionary movement that attacks the achievements of modernity, defending conspiratorial, supremacist, racist, negationist and misogynist theories. The attack on abortion rights, on the rights of trans people and the relentless assault on migrant populations are all part of this reactionary program of an extreme right on the offensive against workers’ rights.
The reactionaries in power around the world combine social attacks with Bonapartist and anti-democratic advances. Extreme right-wing politics involves not only a reactionary social agenda, but also attempts at more authoritarian political regime change. From this point of view, it is both “parliamentary” and “extra-parliamentary”. We recall the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters at the time of Biden’s victory, as well as the actions of Bolsonarists in Brazil after Bolsonaro’s defeat. The advance of the far right challenges the most basic democratic rights, and that’s why defending democratic freedoms is on the agenda for revolutionaries around the world.
The instability of the global situation is currently benefiting the far right, while the centrists are helping to organize electoral defeats. We are witnessing a crisis in bourgeois democracy, in which traditional bipartisanship and the alternation between traditional right-wing and left-wing parties are being called into question. The weakening of the political center is linked not only to the failure of the traditional parties in power, incapable of responding to the economic crisis in the interests of workers, but also to the parliamentary cretinism of those who claim to be fighting reactionary attacks with purely institutional methods.
In this sense, in a context where there is no economic condition for the establishment of reformist governments capable of granting social concessions, the formations of the institutional left in several countries are struggling to offer a real alternative of power, for want of their denial to confront capitalist attacks by revolutionary working-class methods, extra-parliamentarily, through popular rebellion, strikes, self-organization and street demonstrations.
v) Anti-capitalist struggles worldwide and the need to transform revolts into revolutions
The class struggle leaves little room for defeatist, alarmist or melancholic positions. Capitalist attacks find in the experience of the exploited and oppressed a “bipole” of struggle and resistance against the system. The unbearable conditions of exploitation, misery, war and destruction of the planet to which capitalism leads us, produce a counterweight of social mobilizations, with a strong tendency towards radicalization, politicization and the accumulation of experiences that converge in the process of recommencing the historical experience of new generations.
In today’s world, reactionary advances coexist with progressive movements of struggle, while there is a trend towards the emergence of increasingly international movements, coordinated at a global level. For the bourgeoisie, the “other side of the coin” of the genocide in Palestine is the enormous demonstrations of solidarity expressed in massive demonstrations worldwide, and in the encampments and college occupations of student youth.
Internationally, we are witnessing strikes and struggles for wages, against inflation and high living costs in many countries. New generations of young workers are fighting to defend their living conditions in the face of attacks by capitalist governments. In this sense, we are extremely interested in the wave of unionization and workers’ recomposition in the United States. This phenomenon of worker recomposition is particularly important in a country where union repression is very strong. Unionization at Amazon and Starbucks, as well as the International Platform Workers Congress in Los Angeles, are evidence of this ongoing phenomenon in the world’s leading power.
On the other hand, the feminist movement continues to be one of the world’s leading social movements. We characterize this movement as internationalist in character, with methods of class struggle such as the women’s strike and expressions of international solidarity with many of our class struggles. Women are always on the front line of attacks by reactionary governments, as in Iran and Afghanistan, and in some countries they are on the frontline against these regimes. The mobilizations for the right to abortion and against violence against women, the pride marches and for LGBTI rights, are a progressive counterweight to the international reactionary wave. The construction of self-organizing frameworks for the feminist movement and the intervention of revolutionaries to build an international revolutionary socialist feminism, as exemplified by the feminist collective “Las Rojas”, are fundamental in this sense.
Although the last conjuncture was marked by the reactionary elements of the imperialist war, in recent years we have also seen numerous popular revolts in all four corners of the world that could reappear on the international political scene. Indeed, in many countries around the world, we are witnessing a shift in political affairs from institutions to direct confrontation in the streets. These revolts against the ferocious living conditions of capitalism, which for the moment are even succeeding in challenging regimes, are not succeeding in triggering revolutionary processes. We can list the countries that have experienced widespread revolt in recent years: Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and Peru in Latin America; Algeria, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka, among others. To these we can add the powerful mobilizations in France and Black Lives Matter against state racism and police violence in the USA.
During these revolts, young people become politicized, intervene and play a central role, as in Chile, where high school students triggered a historic national mobilization process. In Argentina, nearly a hundred universities have been occupied in recent months in a historic movement to defend public education against the Milei attacks. The role of the comrades in the “Ya Basta!” student collective was decisive in setting up a national movement to fight the far-right government.
We are in favor of seeing these revolts through to the end of their process of confrontation with the capitalist system. In this world of political polarization, the politicization and radicalization of youth and the working class can pave the way for new pre-revolutionary situations. We are witnessing a historic recommencement of the experience of the exploited and oppressed. Building a revolutionary party is essential if we are to transform revolts into genuine social revolutions: a party rooted in the working class and youth that enables the revolted population to think about overall perspectives. The international phenomenon of mobilizations and struggles that transcend national borders also highlights the urgent need to build a revolutionary international.
2) National situation: The political crisis, the Macron government’s shit to the right and the polarization of the class struggle in France
i) A deep political, economic and democratic crisis in France
In France, the sequence opened by the mobilization against the Labor Law in 2016 and then mainly by the Yellow Vests movement and the pension strikes (to name just the main social movements) has produced a continuity of class struggle and social mobilizations. Employers’ attacks in the form of labor and pension counter-reforms, governments’ reactionary, securitarian and anti-democratic measures have provoked reactions in society and major mobilizations of workers and youth.
In this sense, the Macron government, which was “neither right nor left” in 2017, today assumes a reactionary profile in alliance with the right and far right. Macron’s rightism, the polarization in the class struggle, the electoral rise of the far right, against a backdrop of economic crisis and international wars, and the crisis of the traditional parties all explain the current political crisis. We are witnessing a political crisis of the regime, with deep-seated democratic problems, in which the trend towards imbalance is growing. This situation could lead to major new social confrontations. In this sense, the institutional left and the trade union leaderships are playing in the realm of the parliamentary circus and social dialogue, without offering any real prospects of struggle for workers and the working classes.
We can say that the current crisis is the combination of a multiple crisis affecting economic, political and democratic aspects. On the economic front, it is clear that for years we have been experiencing an offensive policy of the bosses against workers’ living conditions, to ensure ever greater profits for the capitalists. Waves of lay-offs, factory closures, rising inflation, loss of purchasing power and the impact of the international economic crisis (2008 crisis, pandemic, war in Ukraine, etc.) are all worsening the living conditions of working men and women. What’s more, we’re witnessing years of labour and pension counter-reforms, the withdrawal of concessions and social gains, the privatization of public enterprises, and the smashing of the public health and education systems.
Politically, after François Hollande’s five-year term, the collapsed unofficial Socialist Party vs. the Right of Les Républicains (PS-LR) bipartisan system gave way to Macron’s “extreme center, neither left nor right”, tasked with taking over the bourgeoisie’s affairs in the face of forthcoming instability with a polarization between a rising extreme right and the neo-reformists. The collapse of the Socialist Party (PS) after Hollande’s 49.3 (a disposition in the Constitution that allows for a law to be passed without any vote) and the mobilization against the Labor Law opened up a sequence of political crisis of representation that is still open today. The two parties that previously represented the stability of bipartism, cohabitation and bourgeois alternation were not present either in the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, or in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections. In this sense, if the “president of the rich” succeeded in getting himself re-elected, it was not through the confidence of the masses in his program, but through the electoral tactic of “blocking the far right”, an orientation that has since structured French politics.
ii) The crisis of the Fifth Republic political regime and the democratic demands of revolutionaries
The depth of the crisis in France has had an impact on the population’s perception of the regime, and has raised questions about the regime as a whole. The regime’s crisis is expressed in its inability to mediate between the classes, and in its increasing need to resort to authoritarianism, such as the systematic use of 49.3 and police and judicial repression against any form of social protest, to impose itself. Record abstention rates and the crisis of traditional parties are part of this phenomenon.
The crisis of the French regime is also reflected in major uprisings in colonized regions, such as Martinique and its movement against the high cost of living, and the Kanak national demand. In overseas departments, anger at French colonialism intensified, and the state’s only response was repression. The deportation of Kanak activists to mainland France was a concrete example of French colonial violence. The uprisings in Kanaky against the unfreezing of the electoral body, among others, and the revolts against the high cost of living in Martinique and Guadeloupe have drawn attention to the second-class territories of the French state, and testify to the need for our class and our party to have political responses for movements of resistance to the regime.
The Fifth Republic is not a parliamentary republic, but a presidential one. In the bourgeois state, power does not belong to politicians; they are merely the executors of the bourgeoisie. The fight against the Fifth Republic is essential in the current period, to organize our class at a time when the masses are themselves questioning it. That’s why we’ve decided to propose “Macron Resignation” as a slogan during the most intense moments of the struggle against pension reform. We need to bring down this Republic through mobilization and strikes. We need to take these democratic demands and use them to raise our class consciousness, to lead the fight for democracy, to prove that only revolutionary methods are the right ones to defend the interests of the working class.
In France, the democratic problem runs deep. We can’t write that bourgeois democracy is doing well and that the majority of voters went right in the last elections. This is tantamount to legitimizing the government’s authority. The two major recent social movements, the Gilets Jaunes and the fight against pension reform started from democratic demands from the masses, with the slogan “Macron resignation” at the heart of the demonstrations.
After the new Barnier government came to power, the issue was also taken up by the call from youth organizations. A combative appeal correctly denounced the “anti-democratic coup de force” and demanded the “resignation of Barnier and Macron”. Supporting the demand against the government is a central element of a revolutionary politics for the period, of the possibility of proposing an alternative to the governments of the rich and the ruling class. In this sense, proposing a “sovereign constituent assembly” built from below seems to us to be an orientation to be developed and imposed in contradiction to the bourgeois VIth Republic project.
We need to organize to defend and win the democratic rights that will strengthen the struggle of our class against the bourgeoisie, and give revolutionaries more ground on which to fight. We consider that the international rise of the far right in the current period (Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, etc.) puts democratic demands on the agenda, including in European countries, because this far right challenges democratic freedoms and seeks to advance on regimes of exception or more authoritarian mechanisms of government.
iii) The Macron government’s move to the right and the rise of the far right
Since coming to power in 2017, Macron’s government has gradually undergone a process of rightward shift, with a whole program of capitalist, authoritarian and reactionary attacks on workers and the working classes. The attacks on public services, the privatization and concurrency put in place in transport, the abolition of wealth tax, the capitalist management of the pandemic, the hated pension reform, layoffs and job cuts are all part of Macron’s plan of attack. Macron has been responsible for a brutal crackdown on social mobilization, with police violence reaching a crescendo during the Gilets Jaunes protests and continuing notably against the Palestine solidarity movement. The government’s authoritarianism was also seen in its tendency to rule with the 49.3, with a right-wing policy that encouraged the electoral rise of the far right, which has been gaining ground in France since the beginning of the 21st century.
The outbreak of the massacre in Palestine after October 7 by the Israeli army rekindled political tensions in France, with the France Insoumise’s (FI) prevarication on the one hand, and the anti-Semitism accusations provided from the PS to the RN, and above all by the presidential majority, against all those who expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, on the other. Macron then distinguished himself by his servility to Netanyahu, going so far as to attend the France-Israel match, when a few days earlier, the Israeli army had taken French policemen into custody. Macron claims not to be delivering arms to Israel, but this is false: parts are supplied by France for the production of Israeli weapons. The French government is locking itself into a logic that is dragging it ever deeper into the theses of the extreme right.
Macron benefited from republicanist vote to block Le Pen in 2022, but he has largely betrayed this democratic mandate by already implementing in his government much of the far-right’s agenda. The Asylum and Immigration Act, which Le Pen described as “an ideological victory” for the Rassemblement National, is an example of Macron and Le Pen’s cooperation in the field of racist ideas and attacks on migrants.
Marine Le Pen’s far right is part of the international reactionary wave, adopting anti-globalization, anti-migrant, anti-Europe ideas, and the defense of capitalist and national interests. The RN’s racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia are matched by its support for Israel and its genocidal policies. This complicity between Macron and Le Pen was expressed once again during the mobilizations “against anti-Semitism”, which were nothing more than reactionary demonstrations in support of Zionism.
Bardella’s electoral victory in the European elections and Macron’s dissolution of the National Assembly put strong electoral pressure on the far right, which positioned itself as the main alternative to Macron’s government, even though it failed to win the legislative elections and appoint a Prime Minister from its political family.
In this sense, Macron’s choice to appoint Michel Barnier as Prime Minister, a politician from the smallest group in the National Assembly, an old politician from the Republicans, confirms a reactionary orientation that does not displease the far right. He is a retrograde homophobe from the “Manif pour tous” (« Demo for All », against the Marriage for All i.e. gay marriage), who has been carrying the far-right agenda for years. The attacks on migrants, the budget cuts and the coming waves of lay-offs are part of the government’s plan that we’re going to have to fight against in the next sequence of the class struggle.
Although the Macron-Barnier government, with the complicity of the far right, currently constitutes a dominant reactionary pole, it has not yet succeeded in imposing a historic defeat on the working class in France, which continues to show its combativity at every social mobilization.
iv) The New Popular Front and the institutional impasse of the political and trade-union Left
In recent months, the parties of the reformist left have focused all their energies on a purely electoral strategy respectful of the institutions. The New Popular Front, a class conciliation front from Poutou to Hollande, began by restoring the Socialist Party to good health and resurrecting old politicians who were servants of capital. For the second round of the legislative elections, their political perspective was to use the tactic of withdrawal to get Elisabeth Borne, Gérald Darmanin and other Macron MPs elected, on the pretext of fighting the far right. After the elections, we had to wait long weeks to see the emergence of a weak project for cohabitation with Macron, embodied by Lucie Castets, a top civil servant closer to the PS and the bosses than to the aspirations of working people.
The strategy of the republican front and the electoral barrage against the far right failed to bear fruit, because it was played out solely on the institutional terrain without breaking away from a regime that limits all democratic possibilities, and because it re-established the governing parties in alliance with the far right. After this failure, these same reformist politicians began proclaiming themselves as the alternative for 2027, or resorting to institutional mechanisms, as if Macron could be made to resign by institutional means alone.
Although Mélenchon and others on the left claim to embody a popular front of resistance to the government and the far right, the reality is that their purely electoral orientation is incapable of organizing workers to form a pole of resistance. Instead of representing the intense social mobilizations of recent years at electoral level, the NFP confines the revolts of our social class to parliamentary drawing rooms and prepares only defeats. In this sense, the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste’s adaptation to this electoral formation is a liquidationist orientation of political capitulation.
In this sense, the role of the trade union leadership is far from being up to the task. During the electoral sequence, the unions were content to call for a good vote for the NFP, sounding the alarm of fascism without calling for any day of strike action or national mobilization. Since the summer break, the union leaderships have called for a single isolated day of mobilization with no tomorrow, disarming workers’ prospects in the fight against the Macron-Barnier government.
One of the last major national mobilizations was the fight against pension reform. The inter-union coalition’s refusal to call for an indefinite strike, and its failure to go beyond this framework, enabled Macron to adopt his reform. The union leaderships did everything in their power to spare President Macron, even though his mandate was under threat. They diverted workers’ anger towards a losing strategy: dialogue, referendum, vote of no confidence, letter to MPs, meeting with Mme Borne – these institutional « tactics » led the movement to a dead end. The inter-union coalition’s marked time-outs as it waited for the institutions to respond meant that the movement lost momentum.
The inability of the union coalition to formulate a winning strategy highlighted the need for self-organization by strikers at a grassroots level, to put in place an alternative policy to win the demands. Attempts have been made, notably by the National Student Coordination, spearheaded by the NPA Jeunes, among others. This coordination of students in struggle at national level was able to coordinate days of mobilization among young people, when the inter-union movement offered nothing. This was also the case for the inter-professional assemblies and strikers who went on renewable strike, such as garbage collectors and refiners.
The mobilization against pension reform also revealed the repressive, authoritarian and unfair nature of Macron’s capitalist policies as a whole. This is why the streets have been shouting “Macron resignation” for weeks, calling into question the legitimacy of political power and its regime. During Macron’s speech on April 17, 2023, hundreds of casseroles or ‘pots and pan demos’ were organized to stop hearing the president. These elements raised a political crisis that is still open, with strong democratic questioning of the government’s legitimacy.
The NPA-R did not support the slogan “Macron resignation”. Yet this was an important slogan to defend. The argument we heard was that if the movement succeeded in getting Macron to resign, then the far right would win. But the supporters of Le Pen and Zemmour were not in the streets! If a social movement anchored on the left removes a president, it completely changes the balance of power and puts struggling workers at the center of the political game. Of course, our ultimate goal is the overthrow of capitalism. To achieve this, our class must gain confidence in its struggles. Getting a president out of office, if the street calls for it, is one way of gaining this confidence.
v) Polarization in the class struggle and the need for a revolutionary party
The latest sequence of class struggle in France shows us that there is an accumulation of experiences of struggle against the Macron government and the capitalist system. The counterweight to Macron’s right-wing advance and the electoral rise of the far right lies less in the electoral perspective of the NFP than in the mobilizations and struggles of our class. On the eve of the first round of parliamentary elections, which resulted in Bardella’s victory, the streets of Paris were filled with thousands of demonstrators expressing their support for the Palestinian people. In this way, even as the right and far-right advance their electoral positions and gain space in small towns and rural areas, the streets of big cities hold firm.
The groups that are the main targets of the far right are organizing themselves in various existing struggles. The anti-racist struggle of the Adama committee, but also justice for Nahel, is fighting racism in France. These battles against racism and police violence are absolutely fundamental. In France and elsewhere, as in the United States, we are witnessing a politicization of youth around the fight against police violence, racist policies and attacks from the extreme right. Young people are outraged by the racism of the Borne and Barnier governments, as demonstrated by the mobilizations called by the Adama committee and the demonstrations in working-class neighborhoods following Nahel’s murder. Our organization needs to assert a clear anti-racist profile, by adopting a policy of integrating anti-racist struggles into our areas of intervention.
Environmentalist struggles like that of ‘Earth Uprisings’ (Soulèvements de la Terre) confront climate change deniers and those who let capitalists destroy the planet to make ever more profits. Very recently, the tragedy in Valencia showed us that ecological issues are catching up with our class, whether it is interested in them or not. We believe that an organization of society managed by the workers themselves alone can put an end to the climate crisis. To be intelligible on the subject, it is important for the party to develop a positioning on the environment that allows us to connect the wagons between our final objectives, transitional measures and immediate demands.
The fight against sexual, transphobic and lgbtiphobic violence is also always topical. Women and LGBTI people are repeatedly attacked. This reality is accentuated by conservative, far-right and Macron’s “demographic rearmament” rhetoric. We see feminist youth brimming with anger, but lacking alternatives to turn to.
Targeted by increasingly reactionary attacks and reforms such as the Immigration Law, there is also a crying urgency to support the actions of undocumented migrant collectives, whether in union, student or associative structures, and to propose interventions or even slogans that link their demands for regularization to the battle for the abolition of borders and against the French imperialist state.
We must unconditionally join the struggle to support Palestinian people, that is fighting first and foremost against the ban on demonstrations and the slanderous accusations of anti-Semitism, for an immediate ceasefire and to demand the freedom of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.
The bosses’ attacks, with the 150,000 jobs that could be cut in the coming period, will give rise to resistance from our class. MA France workers have already endured 5 months of strikes. The forthcoming closures of factories such as Stellantis in Poissy, probably before 2028 (2,500 workers), Michelin in Cholet and Vannes, and the social plan at Auchan, will bring us into direct confrontation with the bourgeoisie. As far as the SNCF freight is concerned, all the unions are calling for an unlimited strike from December 11th against the dismantling of the freight branch. Workers’ strikes and mobilizations against the bosses’ attacks continue. It’s up to us revolutionaries to fight for self-organization, to overcome the union bureaucracy and unite workers in the struggle to win their demands.
The existing struggles mentioned above are full of activists and militants (young people, but not only) who represent fertile ground for building a revolutionary perspective. These struggles are also building bridges internationally, with enormous potential for politicization, coordination and regrouping. If we are to build revolution in the 21st century, we need to intervene in these struggles to propose global initiatives and a party open to these struggles. A revolutionary political expression must be capable of regrouping and dialoguing with these existing movements to give them an overall perspective on their anger against the system, and to draw up transitional instructions with a view to building a revolutionary vanguard of social protest movements. This brings us to the debate on the construction perspectives for our party and the critical assessment of our own organization’s experience, fundamental to a refounding congress.
3) Party: critically moving beyond the NPA experience
i) The NPA split and the capitulation of the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste
The new stage of the class struggle brings to the table the need to rethink the strategy of revolutionaries to intervene in the situation as it is in the present period. This stage prepares us for major confrontations and great opportunities for intervention and construction to relaunch the perspective of the revolutionary project.
In this context, the split of the NPA is a major event for the revolutionary left in France. It is clearly a step backwards, a negative outcome to the political problems we have all been fighting for years. For our part, we positioned ourselves “Against the implosion of the NPA” in 2020, as well as for the unity of the left currents of the party to avoid the liquidationist drift, by supporting the Pf5 at the 2021 Conference and the PfC at the 2022 Congress.
We can say that the debates that ran through our organization, between the historic majority current (stemming from the former leadership of the LCR and SU-QI) and the left-wing tendencies of the NPA found a resolution in the 2022 split around discussions on our links with La France Insoumise and NUPES. Finally, in 2024, the split took place definitively (as well as legally) with the integration of the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste into the Nouveau Front Populaire and the presentation of the NPA-Révolutionnaires in the European and legislative elections on an independent basis.
The adaptation of our former comrades to the NFP policy of “Poutou to Hollande” is not a trivial event, but the confirmation of an opportunistic orientation of adaptation to institutions under the pretext of the fight against the extreme right. It’s a drift that had begun during electoral presentations with France Insoumise in Occitanie and Nouvelle-Aquitaine. It’s a drift that involved abandoning the perspective of class independence, in alliance with bourgeois capitalist parties.
This orientation is in line with the Unified Secretariat’s international policy. It is a disastrous orientation that has led entire sections of this international current to political liquidation. We can cite the well-known examples of the support for Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, or more recently the adaptation of all the Brazilian sections of the SU, which joined the PSOL in Brazil. This organization, which previously represented a space of the independent anti-capitalist left, with the figure of Guilherme Boulous, followed the same logic of electoral adaptation, participating in the Lula-Alckmin government alliance under the pretext of fighting Bolsonaro’s extreme right.
For years, the comrades of the USFI majority have been drifting in a defeatist direction, theorizing the need to rally behind the reformist left and justify their current opportunism. They manage to justify a characterization of an historic defeat after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which would imply a long period of retreat for our social camp, in which no revolution is possible. It would be a kind of new period of “crisis and war”, but without revolution. That’s why our former comrades propose moving towards broad formations or popular fronts, without class independence. This political orientation led them to the political liquidation and split of the former NPA, breaking with the revolutionary tradition of the NPA and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.
This discussion is fundamental for us today, because the adaptation of our former spokespersons to institutional games is not just an error of circumstantial course, but a drift that was in some ways already present at the time of the NPA’s creation in 2009. In this sense, the dissolution of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire to make way for the construction of the New Anti-Capitalist Party brought with it these erroneous and defeatist definitions in the characterization of an international stage in the class struggle, with the political and organizational consequences that go with it. The concept of a broad, non-militant anti-capitalist party, with no delimitation of the reformists, based on the premises of 2009, has clearly failed, because it does not prepare us for the confrontations and imbalances of this new stage.
The split of the NPA and the capitulation of the NPA-L’Anticapitaliste to the NFP (New Popular Front) also mark the abandonment of the class independence of the so-called “Mandelist” current, the main far-left current in France after ’68. We regret this step backwards. Drawing up a complete, collective and critical assessment of this experience is essential if we are to lay the foundations for relaunching a revolutionary perspective in France.
ii) Problems and challenges facing NPA-Révolutionnaires
The militants who make up the NPA-Révolutionnaires chose to continue with the NPA, as a defensive policy to avoid the split, save the political independence of our organization and affirm the need to build an independent revolutionary militant party. Two years after the split and at the time of our first congress, we need to assess the problems and challenges facing our organization.
There is much we can claim from our “old” organization. Indeed, the “old” NPA was a party with thousands of activists, bringing together anti-capitalist and revolutionary activists from different traditions, the main far-left party in France and a national reference point. The NPA was an organization with links to all organizations, unions, collectives, parties and associations, as well as nationally recognized spokespersons. Organizationally, our former organization found no impediment to turning to spaces for coordinating struggles with feminist, ecological or international movements. It did not deny or hide internal debates, allowing them to be presented even with contradictory positions, and respecting the rights of minorities to representation. These are elements that we believe should be preserved in our future militant practices.
The NPA-Révolutionnaires is starting out with the objective difficulties of a new organization just beginning to take shape. Although the party is smaller, its militant character, youthful composition and clarity about its class independence are positive points of support. However, the party has a problem to overcome in its attachment to the NPA name, which remains largely associated with the former spokespersons of Poutou and Besancenot, fully integrated into the NFP. Our lack of nationally-recognized spokespersons is a difficulty in making our politics audible, and we must set ourselves the task of building spokespersons who are representative of our class. In this sense, electoral participation is essential.
It seems to us that our party is currently experiencing other difficulties linked to problems of orientation. We can’t write every week about the need to destroy capitalism without explaining how we think our class can achieve this. There is a real difficulty in formulating instructions and transitional demands to link our immediate demands to the ultimate goals. We need an orientation that is useful in giving us real political perspectives that are not just the repetition of slogans. We need a dialogue with the real and existing level of consciousness of our class, in its current composition and fragmentation. The lack of political elaboration, theoretical reflection and the simplification of political positions to propaganda formulations or general denunciation disarms the party in its ability to intervene in real movements of struggle with the aim of changing reality.
iii) The “unprecedented fusion” of two majority tendencies and the danger of becoming a small version of Lutte Ouvrière
We’re going to tackle without any taboos what we consider to be our party’s main political problems, first and foremost that of the “fusion”. The comrades of the majority leadership proudly proclaim their “unprecedented fusion”. Indeed, the comrades propose that their merging constitutes an unprecedented event in history. The comrades should review the history of the revolutionary movement to see how ridiculous this claim is. That two groups from different trajectories find themselves in a common process is something that exists everywhere and has always existed. What’s more, for two NPA groups to form a leadership bloc and a common platform for a congress is something that has happened on many occasions in the history of our organization. The unity between l’Étincelle and A&R is not a historic event in the history of the working class. What is historic in any case is the definitive break with the NPA and the capitulation of the historic current coming out of the LCR. Learning from this experience is vital if we are to relaunch a revolutionary perspective in France.
However, the comrades of the majority claim to be merging on the basis of an organizational agreement, putting into a common pot what they do together and what they do separately. On this point, the situation is somewhat unprecedented, as we have not seen any other cases of fusions based on the unification of organizational bodies without any agreement on program or strategy. While there have been agreements between organizations, notably for the creation of electoral fronts, merging two political currents in this way requires a certain originality of method. What’s more, we find it hard to see how comrades could export this organizational drift to the international level, by proposing international regroupment without a political basis to other international currents in the Trotskyist movement.
On the other hand, the fusion of the majority from above operates internally as a block to debates from below. From this point of view, the closure of the leadership agreement to the two majority currents leaves aside the possibility of politically integrating the other sensibilities that exist in our organization. In this sense, we are particularly astonished by the fractionalism and growing hostility of the majority leadership towards our political sensibility, admittedly a minority in France, but with an international development, a political trajectory and a theoretical elaboration that far exceeds that of the other currents of the NPA-R. This disregard for international experience and theoretical elaboration is surprising, when comrades could be taking advantage of it to feed off these experiences as they face up to the multiplicity of political problems involved in leading a revolutionary organization in France. Our exclusion from the party’s executive bodies and its youth sector is symptomatic of this contempt and narrowness. This decision is all the more surprising given that our current has always campaigned for the unity of our respective currents. We recall that we had to fight hard in the months leading up to the 2022 congress to get the comrades of l’Étincelle to agree to a common platform with the comrades of A&R, including by signing a joint tribune with the comrades of this current and many comrades without tendencies. We also reiterate the definition we made clear at the last Youth Nationaal Conference: the fusion is a party to which we have never been invited.
Let’s move on to the second main problem facing our organization: the danger of becoming a small version of Lutte Ouvrière. Comrades from other currents have already spoken of the NPA-R’s “lutte-ouvriérization” or “étincellization”. Beyond the unfair labels that we don’t want to reproduce, what interests us is to point out the political problem of this phenomenon.
The political bankruptcy and opportunist drift of the comrades who made up the NPA’s former majority before the 5th Congress does not mean that, by mechanical and simplistic opposition, we have to “do like LO”. Certainly, the comrades of Lutte Ouvrière have the merit of constituting the main revolutionary political force in France, of having a significant organizational capacity at national level, and of having succeeded in embodying a class-independent option at electoral level during the last sequence of European and legislative elections. We were also in favor of an electoral front between our two organizations, which unfortunately Lutte Ouvrière refused.
However, Lutte Ouvrière is an organization characterized by routine and dogmatic practices, without reflecting on the dynamic changes of the period or adapting its positions and methods to the needs of the political struggle. LO’s indifference to life outside itself has proved ill-suited to the boiling period of international polarization we have just described. The organization’s insensitivity to the rise of the far right and its waste of a situation that offered the opportunity to build an electoral front of revolutionaries during the legislative elections is symptomatic of this problem. The ridiculous debate that took place at the RER between our two organizations was a caricature of revolutionary Marxism that could only provoke laughter from the comrades present, without contributing anything in terms of perspectives for revolutionary intervention in the current situation.
Because of the limits of its political orientation and its wait-and-see, defeatist strategic hypothesis, we don’t believe that LO is capable of leading a revolutionary front around itself to give political answers to the combativity of our class in periods of instability and major confrontations. For these reasons, we refuse to see the NPA-R become a satellite condemned to orbit a new planet of reference, which constitutes no gravitational center for the vanguard, activism and movements of struggle against the government and the capitalist system.
iv) A combat party with a strategy of global revolutionary political struggle
We are in favor of building a combat party, with a strategy of global revolutionary political struggle. To build a party, we need to start thinking of ourselves more as a party and less as a fraction. A party implies a program, strategic definitions, stages of construction, membership of an International – questions still unanswered for the NPA-Révolutionnaires. We need to respond to all these needs.
We’re in a new stage of class struggle, in a more dangerous and polarized world, in which it’s vital to train new generations of revolutionary activists through struggle, for the battles to come. We want to build a workers’ combat party with a strategy of political struggle, not just propaganda, but capable of giving a global perspective to our class’s social protest movements.
We want to relaunch the battle for socialism in the 21st century. To do this, we need to rethink the theory of revolution and the historical assessments of past revolutions. It is essential to rethink the experience of Stalinism and bureaucratization in order to rethink today’s revolutionary communist project.
This first congress must serve to ask these fundamental questions and collectively bring about a revolutionary refoundation of the NPA-Révolutionnaires. After the split in the NPA, the revolutionary left in France needs to be refounded, and this congress is an opportunity to do just that. To transform social revolts into genuine socialist revolutions.
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