BY DANNY FAIRFAX
The 15th congress of the Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, LCR), held October 30-November 2, sealed an historic pact with France's other main revolutionary socialist party, Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle, LO), to jointly contest the 2004 French regional and European Union elections.
A poll conducted on November 2 by the Journal du Dimanche showed that the prospective alliance would attract around 9% of the vote, with a further 22% of respondents saying that they would "consider" voting for the LCR-LO ticket.
In 1999, a similar LO-LCR joint ticket won 5.2% of the vote in the European Parliament election, giving the alliance five MEPs. However, in last year's French presidential election LO refused to participate in a joint ticket with the LCR.
Despite this, the separate campaigns collected a total of 10.5% of the vote, including an impressive and unexpected 4.25% for the LCR candidate, 27-year-old postal worker Olivier Besancenot. The LO candidate, bank clerk Arlette Laguiller, who has contested every presidential election over the last three decades, received 5.75% of the vote.
The electoral pact is a key victory in the LCR's principal project of rassemblement (regroupment) of militant left organisations and the construction of a party capable of uniting the anti-capitalist left in France, and follows the remarkable success of the presidential election campaign. As one speaker at the LCR congress said, "Only some tens of thousands of voters really knew the LCR or the LO, their programs and the differences between the two organisations, but in the meantime three million of them voted for their two candidates."
LO's willingness to take part in a united anti-capitalist left ticket for the European Parliament elections stands in stark contrast to their sectarian intransigence in other types of elections and in other fields of work, even when collaboration would greatly benefit the radical left as a whole.
The hope is that common work in the upcoming elections will lay the groundwork for further cooperation and even unity between the two organisations, by exposing members of the secretive LO to the huge potential a united left alternative can bring, and by attracting left activists who are otherwise put off by the current division of the revolutionary left.
For its part, while the LCR would see unity with LO as of great importance, it is not allowing the project of rassemblement to be held hostage to the whims of LO. Many of the activists in France's powerful social movements, above all, the anti-globalisation movement, are not members of any party, but are nevertheless opposed to the capitalist system.
With this in mind, the LCR is also embarking on a process of initiating local conferences for the anti-capitalist left, which it hopes will converge at a national conference at the end of 2004.
In addition, the LCR has made key decisions in transforming itself to relate better to the growing sentiment for radical social change in France, such as abandoning its previous practice of giving its members code names, and adopting more decentralised methods of functioning. Over the last 18 months, the LCR has doubled its membership.
The growth of the LCR, especially amongst young people (who form the bulk of its new members), the increasing power and articulation of the mass movements in France, and now the prospect of a joint election campaign with LO, have the parties of the so-called mainstream left running scared.
The Laborite Socialist Party (PS), now described by the LCR as "social-liberal", is lurching from crisis to crisis after not even making it to the second round of last year's presidential election, while the Communist Party (PCF) only received a miserable 3.3% of the vote, its smallest post-World War II tally.
"We are ready for a role as more than simple opponents to social democracy", Francois Sabado, one of the LCR's leaders, told journalists at the end of the party's congress. "We can be a real political alternative."
Much of the corporate media coverage of the LCR-LO alliance has focused on the LCR's decision to revamp the language in which it presents its aims. Thus, congress delegates voted, by an 85% majority, to adopt new party statutes which drop use of the words "dictatorship of the proletariat". The LCR now defines its aim as "battling for a socialist revolution and for the workers' empowerment".
"We are addressing ourselves to the millions of people who are not extremely politicised", Besancenot was quoted as saying by Agence France Presse. "We must explain to them in a simple, but not a simplistic, manner some complicated things."
From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
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