Preamble:
We believe that the next World Congress must not turn its back on the debate on the type of party and international we want to build. The text proposed to the Congress by the majority of the IC completely avoids this question. It is the first time that a Role and Tasks document presents no orientation, be it correct or mistaken, about what kind of parties to build.
If we are to put an end to capitalism and the criminal impasse it represents, we must tackle this crucial and above all urgent discussion head-on. We cannot, therefore, simply address conjectural or partial organizational questions, but must return to the type of party and international we want to build.
To launch the discussion and arrive at a final text at a resolution, we propose to start from the text: "Seizing opportunities, building an international for revolution and communism" submitted by the TIR (Tendency for a Revolutionary International) to the vote at the last World Congress.
We therefore propose to start with the part of this text that deals with the role and tasks of the FI. We see this as a starting point for discussion. The section on the transitional programme for the 21st century will obviously need to be amended and updated. We are not rejecting all the organizational proposals put forward by the majority of the FI; we will also be making some, particularly on the democratic front. But as for us the priority is to start fromwith our strategic objective and the party we need to achieve it.
A- Building vanguard revolutionary parties: the relevance of Leninism
Lenin, in “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder”, sorts out three conditions for a revolutionary party of cadres to emerge and forge itself for the revolution, in contrast to the caricatured vision of Stalinists.
First, the existence of a relatively conscious combative layer of the proletariat, with its class-conscious vanguard devoted to the revolution, with “tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism”. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish— merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct.
These conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in turn, is not a dogma, but assumes its final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and revolutionary movement.
"No revolution without a revolutionary party." This means that beyond the diversity of tactics that revolutionaries may adopt in building their parties according to countries and situations, building revolutionary parties, parties for the seizure of power and communism remains the strategic objective.
In order to build revolutionary organizations that do more than simply proclaim principles, we have set ourselves the objective of building a party of cadres capable of giving life to these programmatic principles, which means seeking to give all our activists the means to acquire the highest possible level of training so that they can play a role in destroying capitalism and building another society. But this training must be consistent with our militant practice. To be able to put an end to the system that generates exploitation and oppression, we need to minimize the separation between the private and political spheres. This separation is the product of the capitalist system in which we live. Against this logic of "separation", we consciously give ourselves over to the prospect of revolution and make it consistent with our choices and lifestyles. This is the exact opposite of the frustration of each individual; on the contrary, it is emancipation and association, freely consented and against the current of the dominant ideology conveyed by the State, school and family, to come together to achieve a common goal: the destruction of the capitalist system, made up of exploitation and oppression, to build another society, a communist society.
The search for a foothold in the working class and in the oppressed sectors is decisive and must be the subject of systematic discussion and its own tools. The actuality of the insurrectional general strike as the main "strategic hypothesis" in a majority of regions of the world, and our analysis of the central role of the working class must therefore have practical consequences from the outset, in our sections and on an international scale. What do we mean by this? It means that we have a proactive policy of establishing ourselves in the key sectors of the capitalist economy. That an effort must be made in each section in this direction, but also that the international level helps to achieve this objective and participates in the effort. Through theoretical input, but also by centralising information. It also means that we systematically develop independent political intervention in the direction of our class.
All revolutionaries need to think about how to fight back against both austerity and the capitalist system. The only way to defend our social rights and win new ones is always through the mobilization of the working class and youth. Every social gain has been achieved through mobilization. The history of the 20th century demonstrates this. Workers' and women's rights were not won in elections but through strikes and mobilization. In this sense, our main task is to rebuild class consciousness. The most effective way of doing this is by confronting the interests of the working class with those of the bourgeoisie. Struggles, demonstrations, occupations, assemblies and strikes are the best tools for raising the level of consciousness of the oppressed. There is no shortcut to the revolution, through parliamentarism or the commanding heights of bourgeois governments. We certainly cannot ignore elections, but they must be subordinated to mobilizations. In our strategy, elections are not an end in themselves, but a means of strengthening the mobilization of our class, with the aim of raising its consciousness; workers and youth must lead the struggle against all oppressions and link them to the struggle for class emancipation. It is therefore necessary for the mass organizations of the workers' movement to include in their platforms elements such as "equal pay for equal work", respect for LGBT rights and the socialization of the work of social reproduction.
The strategic hypothesis we defend for ending capitalism is an uninterrupted series of mobilizations that make the working class aware of the need to take power in order to build socialism. We do not fetishize strikes, but they are an essential means of raising workers' confidence in their own strength.
Strikes are schools of combat because they are moments in which the working class can self-organize and they are a means of conflict.
We revolutionaries cannot ignore today's struggles, however small they may be. On the contrary, we must take part in them.
A revolutionary international that does not make youth its priority is an international doomed to disappear. Youth always plays a tactical vanguard role. This theory, developed by Ernest Mandel, is still relevant today, whether we consider the processes of the Arab revolutions or the mobilizations in many countries, from Latin America to the Middle East and Europe. Its role in struggles is always crucial, and recruiting young people is quite simply vital for any revolutionary organization. To be consistent with this assertion means not abandoning several of our current's theoretical and interventional achievements. We defend the autonomy of youth, an autonomy subordinate to the proletariat and its historical interests, but with forms of organization which are not independent but autonomous from the organizations of the workers' movement and the parties which we are building. We therefore set ourselves the objective, wherever possible, of building revolutionary youth organizations. The youth sectors in our parties are a means of achieving this goal. We also need to have a specific focus on young people in education. This is a sector of youth that plays an active role in revolutionary upheavals. The international youth camp therefore plays a fundamental role in this policy. But it must not exclude voices of dissent to the leadership of the FI. The refusal to allow the youth sector of the NPA to take part, like the refusal to allow four comrades from IZAR, some of whom have been building up the FI for fifteen years, to simply come in and hold a workshop at the last camp, shows a worrying theoretical and militant weakness. These episodes are symptomatic of a sclerotic and fearful sectarianism that in fact forms young people who get used to these practices under the pretext of ideological purity and the fight against «factionalism».
There is no Great Wall between what we defend as a project for society, communism, and the party we are trying to build. There must be coherence between these two terms. Our party will not be an island of communism because it lives and develops within the framework of social relations determined by the capitalist system and patriarchy. But we must get as close as possible to this. This of course concerns militant relations, which must respect democratic principles and not contradict our programme to fight against all forms of oppression. But beyond that, it's the freely consented association of men and women who are fighting for communism and who are governed by relationships that cannot contradict these principles of emancipation. It fights against any form of "separation" produced by capital between intellectual and manual labour, between men and women, between nationals and foreigners, between the private and political spheres... It refuses any form of taboo within the organization, but instead builds, through debate and verification through practice, a programmatic and interventional unity of all its members.
B- Defending a transitional programme for the 21st century
The FI should defend a set of key measures, a transitional approach: starting with everyday demands, linking them to the question of power and the aspiration for a different society. In short, to link the current struggles to the questioning of the pillars of the capitalist system.
One of the first axes of this programme is the expropriation of key sectors of the economy. The 2008 banking crisis and the bailout plans opened up a new opportunity to explain popularly the need to requisition the banks. Company bankruptcies, mass redundancies, and the struggles they provoke also open for us the opportunity to revive the struggle for workers’ control and to explain the need to requisition the major means of production, communication, and exchange. A transitional approach would mean, for example, linking the ban on redundancies with workers' control of hiring.
Fossil and mineral resources are not infinite. Peak extraction will be reached in the next few years. The structural logic of capitalism is to consume ever more raw materials and energy. The aim of capitalism is to produce more and more and make more and more profit. Capitalism cannot be “green”. Capitalism is destroying our environment and its species. It is destroying our planet. But here again, there can be no consistent ecology without a consistent struggle against capitalism and without the understanding that the only subject that can put an end to capitalism and the ecological disaster it engenders is the working class. If we share this analysis, we must draw the consequences in terms of implementation, intervention and orientation. In the face of ecological disaster, it is the working class, allied with other sectors, which is capable of imposing a programme of anti-capitalist ecological transition, based on the questioning of fossil and nuclear energies and on the need for economic planning on an international scale.
The capitalist world remains structured and organized by imperialism, whose interests are never bound by any commitment to any people, even if they may occasionally choose to support a particular struggle with their own methods and objectives.
Anti-imperialism must constitute a central axis of our propaganda and our activity: we take a stand against all imperialist interventions and for the withdrawal of imperialist troops.
The war in Ukraine is primarily an inter-imperialist conflict. Defending the right to self determination for all peoples in Ukraine and opposing Putin’s invasion is correct, but it cannot be an excuse for refraining from denouncing the responsibility of western imperialism and NATO in the tensions in Eastern Europe. We demand the withdrawal of Russian troops as much as we denounce the involvement of NATO in the war today. We denounce the war profiteers and weapon dealers, whose profits have skyrocketed with the war in Ukraine. We reject any appeal asking our governments to supply weapons to the Ukrainian army. We do not nurture the illusion that our bourgeoisie could defend the attacked peoples of the region.
Faced with our own imperialism, it is not up to us to create illusions on the theme of arms, not bombs. And that is exactly what happened to the MPs of the Red and Green Alliance, including members of the QI, who voted in 2014 in parliament for war credits on the pretext that this would make it possible to send arms, but very quickly found themselves faced with the second stage, the only one that was really important for the Danish government as for the others: the sending of Danish F-16s to bomb Iraq alongside the United States and France.
The working classes who rise up will have to confront both "their own" national state apparatus and imperialist international institutions like the EU. "The main enemy is at home" also means that we must fight simultaneously against the international imperialist coalitions in which our own bourgeoisies participate. While firmly opposed to any nationalist capitalist alternative, we know that an anti-capitalist policy is incompatible with the EU.
We know that the fight against imperialism, racism, austerity and capitalist domination cannot be waged at the level of a single country. Nor can it be waged without breaking with the policies of the capitalists, the EU and the ECB, the Europe of finance. Attacking the power of our national bourgeoisies means breaking with the institutions of the European Union which is impossible without overthrowing the power of capitalists.
Against the Europe of capitalists, we defend international solidarity for a socialist Europe of workers and peoples.
The imposition of austerity on a global scale is inseparable from the corresponding rise in imperialist wars and interventions. We are almost daily witnesses to wars, massive bombings, mass murders by privatized or mercenary armies, drone strikes, embargoes or sanctions, and quasi-secret wars waged by the United States, the dominating imperialist power with its historical European imperialist congeners. This is the case with the US African Command, which is recolonising and plundering Africa. French imperialism too, like other former European colonial powers, is always mantaining an important intervention in Africa and elsewhere to defend and expand its interests.
There are no "humanitarian wars" waged by the imperialist beast. There never have been. The term itself is unacceptable to revolutionaries, whose raison d'être is to oppose all imperialist wars and interventions. Unconditional support for the right of oppressed peoples and nations to self-determination is a fundamental revolutionary socialist principle. The FI must unconditionally reject all appeals to imperialism to help defeat local tyrants and dictators. Such "aid" inevitably has consequences, deadly consequences that are more like a noose around the neck than any kind of "benign" or "democratic" assistance.
The liberation of the oppressed can only be achieved by their own independent mass organizations and by the building, when the time comes and however difficult the circumstances, of revolutionary socialist parties of the Leninist type. The rejection of imperialist intervention in all its forms is the prerequisite for victorious national liberation struggles, and for any other victory. Freed from the yoke of imperialism, oppressed nations are best able to determine their own future and effectively challenge their own bourgeoisies.
In the face of the incessant imperialist wars of conquest, the central demands of the FI should center around two watchwords: "immediate repatriation of troops!" and "the right to self-determination for all oppressed nations!"
We defend the right of peoples to self-determination. But we do not place ourselves under the leadership of any national bourgeoisie, even if it comes from an oppressed nation. In oppressed nations, we defend a balance between the democratic struggle for the right to self -determination and the struggle for a classless society. This means that, according to our strategy, the struggle for national emancipation can be useful for the emancipation of the working class, only when the working class leads the strugglein a way compatible with the world’s working-class cause. Thus, we must maintain class independence from the bourgeoisie of oppressed nations. For example, the struggle for the right to self-determination of the nations oppressed by the Spanish state can be a springboard in the struggle against capitalism if our class plays a leading role in it.
This programme is not an electoral platform or a government programme. We explain that it can only be imposed by an overall mobilization of the working class and the oppressed, which brings to power a workers' government that destroys the bourgeois state by relying on the organs of self-organization born of the mobilization of our class allied with the oppressed.
Opposing class collaboration popular fronts
By exposing the very nature of the system and triggering mass anger, the global capitalist crisis has offered substantial opportunities to the revolutionaries. However, those opportunities have been generally missed, for the moment. There are several reasons for that, but among them there is undoubtedly a key political reason: the adaptation of most revolutionary or anti-capitalist currents to the class collaborationist strategy of “broad parties” and “left governments”.
The fraudulent class collaborationist project of SYRIZA in Greece has been promoted for years as the model for all workers’ movements. The popular front government of SYRIZA along with the nationalist bourgeois party of the Independent Greeks in 2015 miserably failed to fulfil any promise, inflicted a substantial defeat to the working class and brought the mass movement in a state of shock and confusion. The endurance of the current utterly neoliberal government of New Democracy cannot be explained otherwise. After successive splits, unsuccessful themselves, SYRIZA are now just a small, embarrassing party.
Most international revolutionary currents have uncritically supported SYRIZA ever since the outbreak of the Greek crisis, and are thus now discredited among the militant vanguard in the country. Never after have they made an honest balance sheet about this. However, SYRIZA’s trajectory was predictable, based on the nature of the party and the political context in the country. Unfortunately, the majority of the FI ignored the positions of the Greek section at the time. The Greek sections presented a detailed balance sheet that is still available to all comrades of the FI.
Today, the same mistake seems to be repeated in an even more highlighted case: the New Popular Front in France.
The formation of the "Nouveau Front Populaire" is the new avatar of the institutional left in France.
After coming out on top in the first round of the last legislative elections, the NFP became a part of the "republican front", even calling to vote for former President Hollande and for ministers in the Macron government.
This republican front enabled Macron's party to stay in power by allying itself with the right and relying on the far right.
By theorizing that the existence of a "credible political outlet" is a necessary condition for any change in the balance of power, the NPA l'Anticapitaliste has come to support the NFP, even when it helped Macron stay in power. This is not just a tactical error, but a fundamental error due to the loss of class independence.
The sometimes correct positions taken by the France Insomuise (LFI), the NFP's main force, on issues such as support for Palestine, are being used to subordinate mobilizations to the parliamentary calendar. At present, no traditional leadership of the workers' movement, including the LFI, is proposing any plan of action against the government and bosses.
C- Building a revolutionary international
We insist that we must set ourselves the objective of building a militant international organization capable of conducting coordinated campaigns on an international scale. Even with modest forces, an organization established in several countries and acting in a coordinated way can multiply the effectiveness of its intervention.
Our international must put the discussion of a revolutionary communist programme that confronts the realities of 21st century capitalism back on the agenda, instead of theoretical discussions that are unrelated and divorced from practice. In this course, political and material independence from reformism is indispensable. Trailing behind reformist parties has already cost revolutionary currents, and thus the working classes, too much.
We cannot embody the revolutionary communist international on our own. We must seek to bring together revolutionaries from different traditions, based on an agreement on the situation and the tasks. It is through common practice that political discussions can lead to regroupments. Bringing revolutionaries together on an international scale should be one of the objectives under discussion in the FI. Building a revolutionary international capable of exerting a significant influence will not only involve strengthening our organization: the FI could propose to other national or international revolutionary groups that they begin discussions on the responses to be given to the crisis of capitalism, on the common campaigns to be led and on the type of organization to be built.
We know that this policy of seeking discussion with other traditions will not lead to rapid rapprochement in the short term, given the conviction of the Trotskyist leaderships of the various internationals of the correctness of their programmatic and tactical positions and especially about building around their own group. However, we must be aware that we will not build an international for revolution and communism by a slow accumulation of forces around us. We still have things to learn from the different Trotskyist revolutionary traditions and even beyond. There are valuable experiences and activists in many currents and organizations. It is through theoretical and programmatic debate in tension with intervention in the field of class struggle that explosions, regroupments and recomposition at national and international level will take place.