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. 47 votes of gap). It was held a few months after the entire NPA led the NPA presidential campaign, a campaign which contributed to a new militant influx towards the NPA, in one year, of more than 500 activists, young people, educated or workers who have joined the ranks of the party.
Despite these steps forward, part of the outgoing leadership of the NPA chose to leave the congress before any vote, including the decisive orientation votes, to pursue alone a policy towards the NUPES and its main component LFI, initiated in the 2021 regional elections in New 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 at this congress. The few splitters from the outgoing leadership chose to try to blow up 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 mainly for platforms which 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…).
This choice is irresponsible, especially since the national and international situation demands that revolutionaries close their ranks and advance perspectives of revolutionary emancipation for the world of work and youth. Let them come together rather than divide. But the NPA will continue, despite the departure of its main spokespersons. We, delegates of the “News and Urgency of the Revolution” platform, 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 in Congress. From Monday, we will bring together all the authorities of the NPA.
We call on all the activists of our party, behind the majority who 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 center for bringing together revolutionaries, towards a revolutionary workers’ party. And workers.
Here in France, the world of work is faced with an all-out offensive from employers and the government. Employees, including the most precarious, the unemployed, retirees, disabled people are hit hard. With inflation exceeding 6% at an annual rate, wages are being cut a little more each day, and the working classes are being promised new sacrifices: for many, it is a question of being hungry and cold, without electricity and heating, this winter. For the start of 2023, prices for public transport, motorway tolls, post office, etc., are all announced to increase. And the government is launching its attack against the amount of old-timers’ pensions, among other things by raising the legal retirement age.
This autumn has already been marked by a large number of mobilizations and strikes, for wage increases, fragmented and isolated but nevertheless determined. The national strike meeting day of October 18, of support for the refinery strikers but also of rage 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 for mobilizations and their generalization, the only thing capable of changing the balance of power and repelling these employer and government attacks: for an increase in salaries and pensions of 400 euros net monthly for all, no income below 2,000 euros and a systematic alignment of salaries with prices, for a full-rate retirement by contributing for a maximum of 37 and a half years and from the age of 60. It is in fact a matter of imposing a sharing of work between everyone – to work for all and work less -, without a reduction in salary, with, on the contrary, salaries that follow the cost of living. Added to the demand to uproot these vital demands is anger at the growing deterioration of health, education and transport conditions, as well as at the ecological damage which is ruining the daily life 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 an overall response from the world of work and not from institutions. It is neither in parliament nor in the social dialogue fairs that the world of work will be able to achieve victories. There will be no, as the FI defends, capitalism with a human face, nor a citizen revolution through the ballot box. We reaffirm the necessity and the possibility of building a revolutionary party, because pushing back the bosses and ultimately wresting power from them will not be done through elections. In the immediate future, the NPA will prioritize the construction of mobilizations, with all those, and there are many around us, organized politically, in unions or in associations, and even more numerous unorganized, who will want to go to this sense. We will demonstrate in the NPA procession at the Solidarity March on December 18, which we call on people to join en masse.
Faced with the rise of the nauseating currents and ideas of the extreme right, nationalist and racist, widely taken up by the right and the government itself, faced with the war and the chaos towards which capitalist society is taking us, we have a responsibility particular towards our social class, a responsibility to help it have confidence in its own strengths to fight on its own ground and escape from institutional illusions. While the world of work shows its strength in blocking the whole of society when it goes on strike. Force of blockage but force of reorganization of the whole 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 strike waves broke out in different 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 experienced a resurgence of mass protests: in the four corners of the globe and today in Iran and China. They add to the massive struggles of women for the right to abortion and against sexist and sexual violence, to the struggles for LGBTI rights, to the struggles of young and old 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 affirmation are presenting themselves for our class almost everywhere in the world, it is time to bring to life in the made a revolutionary pole. To bring together these forces, minority but nevertheless very real, which campaign for the revolutionary overthrow of the system. A capitalist system which accumulates evidence of its failure to satisfy the needs of humanity, while today, among the eight billion individuals, a majority is kept on the verge of survival.
We address all workers, young and old, revolted by the system of capitalist exploitation and its procession of misery, wars and oppression: join us for its overthrow and let us all stand together on the front from the scene the news and the urgency of the revolution!
(Pages and articles on the 5th NPA Congress)
