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Nick Barrett  

One part of the general process of left realignment is revolutionary regroup-ment. In a way, the request made by the French group of the IS Tendency, Socialisme par en bas (SPEB), to join the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (which belongs the United Secretariat of the Fourth International) is an advanced organisational example of regroupment. It isn’t the only one, but because of the prominence of the LCR on the European revolutionary left, it is of particular interest to all members of the Tendency. 

The aim of this contribution is to give some details of what is going on, the debates which are being raised, and, to a certain extent, the new ways we are trying to go about addressing them. Concretely, the LCR national leadership will decide in January whether or not to integrate Socialisme par en bas as a political current in the LCR. We expect and fervently hope that the reply will be positive, thus culminating in the succesful first step of revolutionary regroupment, at least in France.  

The LCR, at least from an electoral point of view, is—together with Lutte Ouvrière, the other well-known revolutionary organisation in France—the most prominent revolutionary left organisation in Europe. 1.2 million people voted for Olivier Besancenot, the postal worker on the LCR central committee, in the first round of the French presi-dential elections in April 2002. Arlette Laguiller (Lutte Ouvrière), the other main revolutionary candidate, got 1.4 million votes, the total vote for revolu-tionaries was three million, an incredible 10 percent.  

We should always keep in mind that this is one part of a process unfolding at the moment. It is linked fundamentally to the crisis of capitalism, the attempts by the ruling classes to re-establish profit rates and the resulting attacks on living standards, wages, social services, pen-sions and basic democratic rights. The traditional left throughout Europe has accompanied this process, and in some cases has accelerated it. The experience of the plural left government under Jospin has been not only to open up a huge political crisis in France, of which the most obvious sign was the presence of Le Pen in the second round of the presidential elections, but also to propel the revolutionary left to the forefront of the political debate.  

It has elevated the expectations of hundreds of thousands of young people and workers wanting revolutionaries to take political initiatives that could start changing the situation. This political radicalisation has been fed successively by the huge demonstrations against the FN in April-May 2002, by the anti-war move-ment, and by the mass strikes against the pension reforms. 

 In July 2003, just after the mass strikes, one vociferous neo-liberal right wing MP, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, declared in a long interview with a major finance mag-azine l’Expansion, ‘The right’s problem is that there is nothing between the gov-ernment and the Trotskyists!’, which gives an idea of the extent to which the reformist left is in crisis. Our assessment is that on the two cru-cial counts the LCR have responded well to the challenge, whereas unfortunately the Lutte Ouvrière leadership have not. Firstly, the LCR recognise, and not just on paper but also in terms of practi-cal implication of its militants, the im-portance and the centrality of the anti-capitalist movement, which it calls ‘altermondialiste’, emphasising the struggle for a different globalisation rather than the struggle against globalisation.  

After a slow start there is also a growing recognition of the role of the anti-war movement in the process of political radicalisation. Secondly, after the presidential elections, the LCR opened the doors of the organisation and has since almost doubled in size (going from 1,700 to 3,000—the figures are impor-tant and I’ll come back to them later). On both counts Lutte Ouvrière failed, by denying the opportunities opened up by the elections and by maintaining a sectarian attitude to the anti-capitalist movement. We therefore decided that, for a small organisation like ours, the best thing to do was to reinforce the dynamic being created around the LCR.  

Essentially this means that through the activity of the LCR we contribute to recruiting more revolutionaries faster, and push more effectively together with others in building an interventionist revolution-ary organisation. Hence the request to join that we formulated in June 2002. By joining as a current we hope to bring, in an organised manner, the IS tradition to enrich the political debates within the LCR and help to elevate the political profile of the LCR as an open revolutionary organisation. But just as it is the mass movement, whether it be electoral or anti-capitalist or a mass strike, which is the fundamental driving force behind regroupment, it is also the move-ment which is pushing key debates once more to the forefront.  

These debates have to be taken up. For example, anyone present at the European Social Forum in Paris could not have helped being struck by the openness with which people were debating what sort of political perspectives we had to develop, the role of parties in that task, and in particular whether the move-ment should create a radical left or anti-capitalist party. In one debate, Bernard Cassen (ATTAC France) clearly stated that the movement should have for the moment a perspective of lobbying the plural left, rather than launching its own party. So the revolutionary left can’t skip these debates—the right wing of the movement has already a very precise agenda. 

 However, joining the LCR as an organised current doesn’t just make sense in view of the ideological and political competition within the movement. It is also directly linked into the wider situation, and there is in our view an urgency. There is a very great danger in France that the anger and bitterness that has developed may once more spill over into political headway for the fascists. For the moment this is not the case.  

The major problem for the government is how to inflict a serious defeat on, or at least avoid another serious revolt by, the French working class. But over the last few months we have seen mosques and synagogues covered with swastikas by fascists, a renewal in the anti-abortion lobby (in France it’s or-ganised by the fascists) and attempts by fascist groups to return to university campuses during the run-up to the ESF. During the ESF, for example, a weekend-long Holocaust revisionist conference took place in Versailles. Whether it be on abortion, on immigration, on law and order, on freedom of speech and of course the affair of the Muslim headscarf, it is essentially the FN positions which are being adopted by the government.  

There is therefore not just a fantastic opportunity for revolutionaries to build, but also a real urgency. So what are the debates with the LCR? Before mentioning them, a word of caution is perhaps necessary. Our own or-ganisation, and I’m sure it is the case for many groups in the Tendency, is not homogeneous. I think that for a long time we tended to operate as if that were the case, or at least, as if there were only slight differences. In fact there are real debates. This is important, because when we consider an organisation like the LCR, it is not to be considered as a bloc, although as a revolutionary organisation there is a relatively high level of general political cohesion.  

Secondly, there is a long tradition of organised debate within the LCR. This has its weaknesses, but has also maintained a certain unity in the organisation throughout the 1980s and 1990s. For the first time in a while a debate has started inside the LCR on the positions to be held inside the unions. This is very welcome, and it is an obvious example of how the mass strike movement is influ-encing positively the politics on the rev-olutionary left, not only because the questions are being asked, but also be-cause more and more people expect rev-olutionaries to furnish some sort of answer.  

There are obvious debates, such as that on women’s oppression, on the Muslim headscarf. These are certainly important: there is no official position in the LCR on the headscarf in schools, although the least that can be said is that in general it is not the same as that adopted by our comrades. This sort of debate has to be grounded in patient argument on the roots of oppression and class positions with respect to the oppression; it is probably a debate which will take a long time to settle, but it does have to be taken up on every occasion, fraternally but firmly.  

However, the principal discussion is that which cuts across the whole anti-capitalist movement: the relationship be-tween parties and the movement, or in the case of the LCR, the relationship be-tween the revolutionary party and the movement. A key element to this debate is the analysis that we have of reformism: what it is, how it influences workers, and to what extent reformism without re-forms means that the reformist left can have no decisive influence on the move-ment. This debate exists within the LCR—it is for example at the heart of the different positions expressed at the 15th Congress at the end of October.  

I think that the majority of the LCR leadership tend to underestimate a bit the hold of reformism in general, and tend to identify too much the influence of reformism directly with that of social democratic parties or organisations. This approach does have some advantages: because it doesn’t underestimate the weight of the apparatus of the reformist parties it means that you are far less surprised by the control of moribund organisations such as the French Communist Party over the organisational aspects of the ESF thanks mainly to their municipal councillors and control of the town halls.  

But it doesn’t necessarily contain a materialist analysis of reformism and is therefore rather weak on explaining the influence of left and right wing trade union leaders on the movement. One major point of the 15th Congress of the LCR was the decision to launch an appeal for an anti-capitalist left. This will be done following the elections, with hopefully some kind of national meeting at the end of the year. As yet, it is not clear what will be the articulation be-tween the LCR as a major, probably the major, revolutionary current inside a new anti-capitalist left. Our position is that big scores for the combined LO-LCR lists in the regional elections will nourish the debate precisely on a new anti-capitalist left, but also on the role of organised revolutionaries. We need to build strategically a revolutionary organisation, tactically an anti-capitalist left.  

Today, tens of thousands of people on the left want a new political home outside the ex-plural left. The elections look like a good opportunity to advance further these perspectives, though there are problems. The electoral agreement states that no voting advice will be given in the second round unless the FN is in a position to beat the plural left. Thus in second round left-right duels the LO-LCR lists will ab-stain from campaigning. We think that this is ultra-left, but we are prepared to agree upon it for several reasons. First of all, we think the most impor-tant element is a big score in the first round for the revolutionary left.  

Secondly, the situation on the left is rather novel and doesn’t really fit automatically into one of the classical electoral situa-tions described by Lenin or Trotsky, for example. The balance of forces on the left is rather strange given the discredit of the reformist left, without much in the way of reforms to offer and still reeling from the defeats of 2002, given the dis-integration of the Stalinist currents inside the working class, and finally given the incredible numerical weakness of the rev-olutionaries. As the LCR leadership says, ‘Will an anti-capitalist left perspective benefit from a big score for the joint LO-LCR lists? If you ask the question you have the answer.’  

There are only a few thousand organised revolutionaries in France. During the mass strikes in May-June 2003, mil-lions of people turned towards the radi-cal left, and at the heart of this were the revolutionaries of the LCR, and LO. Quite unlike the mass strikes in 1995 that benefited principally, though not only, the plural left, this time round there is an incredible pressure on revolutionar-ies to ‘do something’. In this sense, Olivier Besancenot is quite right to say that the ideas of the LCR are those of the majority: some 60-70 percent of the population supported the strikes, and the revolutionary left and particularly the LCR were the only organisations to work practically and politically flat out to build the strikes.  

But a few thousand is pitifully weak. We need to build. At the ESF, SPEB recruited 150 new members. The big question is of course getting them in-volved not just in building the movement but also in organised revolutionary poli-tics. We need to hold on to them. A number of comrades took part ac-tively in the LCR contingent at the demonstration on the Saturday of the ESF. The LCR says it had 4,000 people in the contingent, 500 of whom were members. It was an LCR contingent, not an anti-war or any other single-issue cam-paign contingent. Therefore the slogans were anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and markedly LCR.  

In fact, it was the contingent of 4,000 radical left activists of the demonstration. We think that the LCR could have recruited most of them during the ESF, giving even better, deeper and denser roots inside the or-ganised working class. The pessimism of the 1980s and early 1990s has gone. Thousands are turning towards the LCR, which has main-tained, at least compared to us, fantastic roots in some sections of the working class. The anti-capitalist youth look politically towards the LCR (46 percent in an opinion poll during the ESF). Of course there are weaknesses, notably the absence of basic and explicit Marxist education for the new and the newer members, and a failure to under-stand the role of the paper as a political organiser and as a political banner for the organisation. This we can help to solve. To be quite honest, I think several thou-sand people would have voluntarily joined the LCR at the ESF if the argument had been sufficiently pushed. That is what is at stake today in France, that is why we want to be a numerous as possible in joining the LCR. Revolutionaries in France need to build on their successes; we think that SPEB in the LCR can help that process.  

Nick Barrett is a leading member of Socialisme par en bas