This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of France's Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
In order to launch the debate on the perspective of a new anti-capitalist party, first of all among the militants of the LCR, then among all those who might be interested in this project, the National Leadership has adopted the following motion. It obviously does not prejudge the outcome of a discussion which is only beginning and which will now continue over the coming months...
1. Injustice in the world has not decreased. Quite on the contrary, it continues to afflict billions of human beings. This multiform injustice is the inevitable consequence of a system of organization of society, capitalism, whose driving force remains the search for the satisfaction of the thirst for power and profits of a very small minority. The exorbitant profits of the CAC 40, the golden handshakes, the managers' huge salaries are accompanied by an increase in inequalities, and often by real distress. It is the insane race for profit, further accentuated by the liberal policies which dominate capitalist globalisation, which generates misery, bad housing and job insecurity, and which deepens social inequalities, destroys public services and social protection, causes wars and the plundering of the Third World, which endangers all humanity by its catastrophic way of managing resources and energy. The logic of the competition of all against all, of the privatization of the world, and the logic of solidarity, of the sharing of wealth, of the broadest democracy, are irreconcilable. To put an end to the dictatorship of the shareholders, of capitalist private property, we will need powerful and generalized mobilizations, strikes, demonstrations, occupations. The future of society is in the hands of the exploited classes, of the wage-earners who produce all wealth.
2. In the name of the rupture, the policies of Nicolas Sarkozy are in fact situated within the continuity and the deepening of capitalist, liberal and antisocial policies. The Sarkozy-Fillon government is at the service of the very rich and the big shareholders. This Right also has a program that is profoundly dangerous for public freedoms, for the right of expression, for the rights of immigrants, women and young people who are victims of discrimination. We have to defeat Sarkozy and the MEDEF by forming broad united fronts.
3. We cannot count on the Socialist Party to lead an opposition worthy of the name. Converted to liberalism, undermined by personal ambitions, more and more obsessed by an alliance with the centrists, the SP cannot lead a change of policy which would concretely make it possible to improve the lot of millions of people. It has abdicated from any inclination to contest the established order, preferring to yield to the logic of financial and imperialist globalization. As for the leadership of the Communist Party, it does not offer any perspective independent of the SP and is locked in its own crisis. Any institutional alliance with the SP is vain and will be a source of fresh disillusions. It is necessary to break with the policies that have been followed by successive governments. A page has been turned. Those who intend to fight without making concessions against the policies of this government, which is a tool of the MEDEF, those who want to defend an emergency anti-capitalist programme like the one that Olivier Besancenot put forward in the presidential election, need a new party which defends the interests of the workers and of all those who are oppressed and exploited. That is why we propose that all anti-capitalists come together in a new party, with roots among young people, in the workplaces, in the public services, in the popular neighbourhoods, in order to build the mobilizations of today which, for us, must prepare a radical, revolutionary, change of society. We are not starting from scratch. Impressive struggles have taken place over recent years and you can feel that faced with the attacks of the new government, the resistance, reinforced by a new generation, is being organised.
4. Concretely, we want to have a debate together with all those, individuals, groups of militants, political currents:
who want to defend an anti-capitalist programme in struggles and in elections;
who situate themselves in the strictest independence from the PS and who refuse to co-manage state institutions with it, preferring to centre their activity on the class struggle, on social and political mobilisation;
who want to come together in a political framework that is organised, militant, national and democratic, a party establishing international links with the forces which defend such a perspective.
5. Initially, we propose that meetings should be organised, from the month of September onwards, in the largest possible number of towns and cities, neighbourhoods, workplaces, universities, colleges and schools. It will be a question of discussing both the forms and the means of organising the indispensable fightback against the measures that will be taken by the government; the program and the democratic functioning of the party that we want to establish; and the presentation at the next municipal elections, in a maximum number of towns and cities, of anti-capitalist lists that will be completely independent of the SP and its allies. The constitution of these lists will be part of the preparation of the new party. In the framework of the national congress, whose preparation is launched as of now, we will draw a provisional balance sheet of the process and make new proposals to go further and to make possible the convergence of everyone in a new party. Next, we envisage holding departmental conferences, going towards a national founding congress of this new anti-capitalist, feminist, ecologist, internationalist, and socialist party. Resist, mobilize and organize, act, discuss and decide, is what we propose to do together, on equal terms.
[Reprinted from http://internationalviewpoint.org.]