Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

France: New Anti-Capitalist Party congress wrestles with challenge of the Left Front (Links)

by Dick Nichols  ·  2013-02-16  ·  first published in Links  ·  349 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to links.org.au”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at Links: read it in full. The full piece runs to about 2,875 words against the 349 that survive here.

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By Dick Nichols

February 15, 2013 – Links international Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The four years since the founding of France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) have been a roller coaster rise and fall for the organisation, which was created in 2009 on the initiative of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) , the former French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International .

The party’s rapid early growth seemed to confirm the premise on which it was founded — tens of thousands of France's workers and young people wanted to get active against capitalism’s crises and crimes, but were wary of existing left organisations and looking for a new sort of political home.

However, after the NPA membership peaked at just under 10,000 (the LCR membership had rarely exceeded 2500), it soon went into decline. By its second congress , held on February 1-3 in the working-class Paris suburb of St Denis, NPA membership was being put at between 2000 and 2500.

The NPA’s 1.15% vote in 2012’s presidential poll also saw its state electoral funding collapse compared to the 2002 and 2007 LCR presidential campaigns in which popular candidate Olivier Besancenot won more than 4%. LCR and NPA leader Alain Krivine told the February 1 Líbération, “The state of our finances is pretty catastrophic.”

To add to the pain, in mid-2012 around 600-800 former NPA members, organised in the Anti-Capitalist Left (GA) current, left the NPA and joined the Left Front (Front de Gauche, FdG) after their call for the NPA to enter that alliance was rejected at its July 2012 conference.

At that point GA became the third grouping sucked out of the NPA by the gravitational pull of the Left Front, which had begun in late 2008 as a coalition between the Left Party (Parti de Gauche, PG) and the Communist Party of France (PCF) for the 2009 European election. In the May 2012 presidential poll the Left Front’s leading personality, former Socialist Party (SP) left tendency leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon , won 11.1% (nearly 4 million votes) on a program of a “citizens’ revolution” against neoliberal capitalism.

The capture this was recovered from