European anti-capitalist left
The European Anti-Capitalist Left (EAL, English : European Anti-Capitalist Left , EACL, French : Gauche Anticapitaliste Européenne , GACE) was a conference context of left parties and electoral alliances from numerous European countries that had existed since 2000 to exchange experiences and formulate meet common political guidelines. Since the EAL does not have enough MEPs in the European Parliament or in national or regional parliaments, it has not yet been recognized by the European Union as a European political party .
Most of the organizations involved are those that emerged from regrouping and reorganization processes of the left after 1990 or that are committed to such reorganizations. Examples include the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the Portuguese Bloco de Esquerda (BE), the Red-Green unit list from Denmark and the former French Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR). These organizations, which represent the “hard core” of the EAL, are groupings that have benefited from the crisis in the traditional social democratic and communist parties in their countries since 1990 and were able to achieve significant electoral successes by presenting themselves as unspent, grassroots, Unbureaucratised forces of an “alternative left” that were not corrupted by references to the collapsed state socialism and Stalinist party traditions, nor by the parliamentary reformism of the social democracy, were profiled.
Basic positions
The forces cooperating in the EAL see themselves as “non-government leftists” who primarily feel connected to social movements of the opposition to neoliberalism and articulate their demands through electoral politics, but do not seek participation in governments. The criteria for participating in EAL conferences are:
- anti-capitalist basic position, socialist target perspective,
- Recognition of the pluralistic character of the left (no monopoly claim for one's own organization or current),
- Striving for joint action by the left in broad alliances,
- a minimum of representativeness (if possible representation in local, regional or national parliaments) and anchoring in social movements.
Despite the latter criterion, most of the organizations involved in the EAL, with the exception of the founding parties mentioned at the beginning, are rather marginal small groups that develop strong activities in social movements, but cannot claim any or hardly any representativeness at the electoral level.
Content orientation and role of Trotskyism
The development of the EAL was largely driven by the Brussels-based United Secretariat (VS) of the IV International . The EAL is therefore often viewed as a Trotskyist project. In terms of its self-image, it is not Trotskyist, but open to all left organizations that meet the criteria mentioned and are interested in working together to unite the anti-capitalist forces beyond the barriers and boundaries that separated them before 1990. It is not the past and historical tradition that are decisive, but the common goal.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the EAL is predominantly made up of organizations with a more or less strong Trotskyist component. While “purely” Trotskyist organizations like the British Socialist Workers Party are the exception - and the French LCR could hardly be seen as “purely Trotskyist” - Trotskyists are influential in most EAL organizations. For some twenty years now, the United Secretariat has not pursued the goal of building purely Trotskyist parties, but has sought to join forces with other left currents. This has been successfully achieved in Portugal, for example, where the Bloco de Esquerda is the umbrella organization of Trotskyists of the Fourth International, the ex-Maoist People's Democratic Union and a group of former Communist Party dissidents, and in Denmark's Red-Green Unity List, in the formerly pro-Soviet one Communists, Trotskyists and other left-socialist and left-alternative forces also cooperate in a common electoral and campaign party if their old organizations continue to exist. Members of the United Secretariat play an important role in most of the EAL parties, and it is undoubtedly they who establish contact with the EAL - which is coordinated from the VS office - and promote participation in the EAL in the respective plural organizations to have. There are also organizations involved which belong to other Trotskyist tendencies and, despite their differences with the United Secretariat, share a certain Trotskyist "family spirit" with it. Organizations without any Trotskyist influence, however, are the exception.
Although it is the declared aim of the EAL to overcome the differences and "identitarian" barriers that have now come to an end in a historical epoch, it has not succeeded in substantially expanding beyond the Trotskyist atmosphere. The attempt to integrate the Dutch Socialist Partij (alternative left-wing socialist with Maoist roots) failed, and the strong and respected Italian Rifondazione Comunista (in which there is a group of the United Secretariat, but which has no decisive influence) dragged on after a temporary participation to an increasingly distant observer status. This has to do with the fact that Rifondazione now sees it as necessary to participate in a government-ready center-left alternative to the right-wing Berlusconi government, which collides with the EAL's rejection of government participation.
Indeed, the basic attitude and political language of the EAL remain largely trotted with Trotskyist patterns. EAL organizations run for elections and seek parliamentary seats, but in principle do not want to govern. They refer to the protest movements against “neo-liberal globalization”, but interpret the entirety of the conflicts that have taken place in them by invoking the “working class”.
Alternative left: problems of interpretation
The EAL is fundamentally based on the analysis that the simultaneous crisis of the traditional social democratic and communist workers' parties, the mutation of social democracy into a neo-liberal force and many former communists to social democrats or majority procurers of social democracy clears the space for a new "alternative left": underneath new political forces are understood that consistently represent the interests of the wage earners against capital and do so with structures close to the base without the hierarchical-bureaucratic apparatus of the old parties. It is hardly illuminated that the decline of the old workers' parties is one of the old working class itself. The social democratic British Labor Party or the French Communists were indeed strong workers 'parties in the past, but their traditional industrial workers' milieus have broken down since around 1980 due to a social structural change.
Today, under the conditions of post-Fordism in a phase of upheaval that is far from over, the constellation of the social question is more complicated. Under the conditions of growing precarization , the totality of dependent workers is invoked as a "working class", which assumes a substantially common interest , at least in need of explanation. Empirically, the “alternative left” of which the EAL speaks is hardly present in the remnants of the old working class milieu, which is still characterized by Fordist structures, but is primarily formed in the area of the proletarianized and precarious middle classes. There are considerable differences between the various countries. The meteoric rise of the Scottish Socialist Party , formed mainly by trade unionists and former Labor left as well as Trotskyist groups , which is arguably the most “proletarian” force in the EAL in the traditional sense, is related to the specific constellation of national and social issues in Scotland. Sociologically, it can hardly be compared with the strengthening of the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, where the Communist Party has traditionally been the dominant force on the left, but it was able to maintain its influence in the old industrial and agricultural milieus, which were relatively intact compared to other countries their ossified appearance and their nostalgic-orthodox-Marxist stance has become increasingly unattractive for the urban left with a higher level of education. The BE was able to fill this gap, having emerged in the Portuguese Parliament mainly with initiatives on more "green" issues such as drug policy and abortion. The sociological facts, which make up the basis of the existence of the organizations of the EAL, are hardly taken into account in EAL documents because the leading forces seem to find it difficult to consistently break away from a world of ideas that assumed that capitalism was homogenizing wage-dependent class, while today it is in fact diversified. A propagandistic and agitational style predominates in the EAL documents, which hardly appeals to large parts of today's "movement left".
EAL and European Left Party
The deliberations made in the EAL to form a joint transnational electoral bloc for the 2004 European elections and to win the Italian Rifondazione as a draft horse, were thwarted by the fact that Rifondazione strongly supported the founding of the Party of the European Left (EL) in May 2004 - with the participation of "established", primarily parliamentary-reformist parties such as the German Left Party or the French PCF . The EL chairman Fausto Bertinotti (national secretary of the Rifondazione, which maintains relations with the EAL with observer status) has spoken out in favor of allowing the EAL parties to join the EL.
EAL and Eastern Europe
The organizations involved in the EAL come exclusively from the part of Europe that was market-based before 1990. Despite intensive efforts, it was not possible to establish cooperation with organizations from the transition countries in East Central Europe. There, the part of the social opposition is taken over by the successor organizations of the old communist state parties, which, mostly fluctuating between real socialism nostalgia and a turn to Western understanding of politics, are far removed from the EAL in their entire political culture. Groups that correspond to the profile of an “alternative left” in the sense of the EAL exist at best as minorities.
Member organizations
Members
Observers and guests
| Political party | country |
|---|---|
| German Communist Party |
 Germany
|
| Synaspismos (dissolved in 2013) |
 Greece
|
| Socialist Party |
 United Kingdom
|
| Socialist Party |
 Ireland
|
| Partito della Rifondazione Comunista |
 Italy
|
| Esquerra Unida i Alternativa |
 Spain
|
| déi Lénk |
 Luxembourg
|
| Communist Party of Austria |
 Austria
|
