The NPA congress brought together 210 delegates this weekend in Saint-Denis, representing the 2,013 members of the party. Platform A received 91 votes, or 6.21%, Platform B 711 votes, or 48.50%, and Platform C 664 votes, or 45.29% (i.e. a difference of 47 votes). It was held a few months after the entire NPA led the NPA presidential campaign, a campaign that contributed to a new influx of activists to the NPA, in one year, of more than 500 activists, young people, schoolchildren or workers who joined the ranks of the party.
Despite these steps forward, part of the outgoing NPA leadership chose to leave the congress before any vote, including the decisive orientation votes, to pursue a policy alone towards NUPES and its main component LFI, started in the 2021 regional elections in Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie, and confirmed during the 2022 legislative elections. A policy of minority separation, which only received 100 votes behind closed doors, while the party had sent 210 delegates to this congress. The few splitters in the outgoing leadership chose to try to explode the party in defiance of the democratic vote of the activists who, however, in their elective assemblies, had voted in majority for an explicit motion in favor of “continuing the NPA”, or by voting in majority for platforms that refused the split, including our platform C. This platform is largely in the majority in the youth sector of the NPA, in many professional branches (transport, Post, auto, etc.) and important departmental federations (Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, etc.).
This choice is irresponsible, especially since the national and international situation requires that revolutionaries close their ranks and put forward perspectives of revolutionary emancipation for the world of work and youth. That they regroup rather than divide. But the NPA will continue, despite the departure of its main spokespeople. We, delegates of the platform “Current events and urgency of the revolution”, who collected almost half of the party’s votes, assume this responsibility towards the entire NPA, its committees, its federations and its branches regardless of the votes at the congress. Starting Monday, we will bring together all the NPA bodies.
We call on all the activists of our party, behind the majority that spoke out against the split, to continue building the NPA with us. And beyond that, with us, out of internationalist responsibility, to fight against the fragmentation of the extreme left and the revolutionary movement on a global scale. The NPA has always conceived of itself as a pole of regroupment of revolutionaries, towards a revolutionary party of workers. And of workers.
Here in France, the world of work is facing an all-out offensive from employers and the government. Employees, including the most precarious, the unemployed, retirees, and the disabled are being hit hard. With inflation exceeding 6% annually, wages are being cut a little more each day, and the working classes are promised new sacrifices: for many, it is a question of being hungry and cold, without electricity and heating, this winter. For the beginning of 2023, public transport fares, motorway tolls, postal services, etc., are all announced to increase. And the government is launching its attack on the amount of pensions for the elderly, among other things by raising the legal retirement age.
This autumn has already been marked by a large number of mobilisations and strikes, for wage increases, fragmented and isolated but nevertheless determined. The national strike meeting day on 18 October, in support of the refinery strikers but also in anger against Macron and his government who wanted to requisition them, showed that an explosion of anger was possible. There is an urgent need to prepare the mobilisations and their generalisation, the only way to change the balance of power and repel these attacks by employers and the government: for an increase in wages and pensions of 400 euros net per month for all, no income below 2,000 euros and a systematic alignment of wages with prices, for a full-rate pension by contributing for a maximum of 37 and a half years and from the age of 60. In fact, it is about imposing a sharing of work between all – to work all and work less – without a reduction in wages, with, on the contrary, wages that follow the cost of living. Added to the demand to win these vital demands is anger at the growing deterioration of health, education and transport conditions, as well as at the ecological damage that is rotting the daily lives of the working classes and young people. These demands for another life, which is not sacrificed to profits, will be obtained through class struggle, through a global response from the world of work and not in institutions. It is neither in parliament nor in the salons of social dialogue that the world of work will be able to win victories. There will be no capitalism with a human face, as the FI advocates, nor a citizens’ revolution through the ballot box. We reaffirm the necessity and the possibility of building a revolutionary party, because pushing back the bosses and ultimately taking power from them will not be done through elections. In the immediate future, the NPA will prioritize building mobilizations, with all those, and there are many around us, organized politically, in unions or in associations, and even more unorganized, who want to move in this direction. We will demonstrate in the NPA procession at the Solidarity March on December 18, which we call on everyone to join in large numbers.
Faced with the rise of the nauseating currents and ideas of the extreme right, nationalists and racists, largely taken up by the right and the government itself, faced with the war and chaos towards which capitalist society is leading us, we have a particular responsibility towards our social class, a responsibility to help it have confidence in its own strength to fight on its own ground and escape from institutional illusions. While the world of work shows its strength to block the whole of society when it goes on strike. A force of blockage but a force of reorganization of the whole of society, if the proletarians in struggle push beyond and organize themselves to lay the foundations of their own power.
The international situation also calls for our responsibilities. Strikes and waves of strikes are breaking out in various countries, including England. More generally, we are witnessing an unprecedented wave of large-scale social protests. In 2019, less than ten years after the Arab revolutions of 2011, we have seen a resurgence of mass protests: in all four corners of the globe and today in Iran and China. They are in addition to the massive struggles of women for the right to abortion and against sexist and sexual violence, the struggles for LGBTI rights, the struggles of young people and adults for the climate and against racism.
At a time when the real dangers of militarization and authoritarian hardening of regimes against the working classes are looming, but when reactions and capacities for assertion are emerging for our class almost everywhere in the world, it is time to bring to life in reality a revolutionary pole. To regroup these forces, minority but nevertheless very real, which campaign for the revolutionary overthrow of the system. A capitalist system which accumulates the evidence of its failure to satisfy the needs of humanity, while today, among the eight billion individuals, a majority is kept on the edge of survival.
We are addressing all workers, young and old, revolted by the capitalist system of exploitation and its procession of misery, wars and oppression: join us for its overthrow and let us all bring to the forefront the topicality and urgency of the revolution!
