The NPA Seven Years On: Project, Reality and Questions
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- Published on Sunday, 28 February 2016 23:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1228 .... February 29, 2016
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The following article was written for Kojkkino, the theoretical magazine of the Greek organization DEA. Though quite long, it does not claim to cover all sides of the question. Indeed, it's the kind of article that is never really finished and that has to be constantly reworked and supplemented. Its main objective is to stimulate collective thinking about the lessons of the successes and failures of the French New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) from its birth to the present day.
The NPA Seven Years On: Project, Reality and Questions
Pierre Rousset
Radical Left organizations in Europe have tended to focus their attention on the major political and electoral experiences that have stood out in the recent period -- beginning with Syriza in Greece, Podemos in the Spanish... State and the Left Bloc in Portugal, and often also Die Linke in Germany, Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark (RGA) and others. This is entirely justified. Still, other attempts at "doing something new" merit analysis, even where successes were fewer or shorter-lived. They provide food for thought about a broader range of national contexts.
The key thing is that the attempt to "do something new" must be real and not just cosmetic. This was the case with the 2009 launch of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France. No doubt, the initiative was launched by the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) on its own, but the LCR dissolved itself at a special congress. We knew, or at least a number of us did, that we were crossing the Rubicon. Whatever was going to happen next, it wouldn't be possible to return to the past. Subsequent developments proved that there would indeed be no turning back.
The LCR itself had been a framework for regroupment. There had been mergers and not just splits! But it remained a "dated" organization, seen as a product of the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s.
