Ligue communiste révolutionnaire

Ligue communiste révolutionnaire
speaker	Olivier Besancenot , Alain Krivine , Roseline Vachetta
founding	1974
resolution	2009
Seat	2, rue Richard-Lenoir 93100 Montreuil
ideology	Communist , Marxist , Trotskyist
International	IV. International (United Secretariat)
European connection	European anti-capitalist left
colour	red
Website	no longer active
(As of May 2008)

The Ligue communiste révolutionnaire ( Revolutionary Communist League ) was a Trotskyist party in France that existed from 1974 to 2009. It disbanded in February 2009 in order to be merged into a new establishment, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste ( New Anti-Capitalist Party ), a no longer exclusively Trotskyist party.

History and program

The LCR was founded in 1968 as the Ligue Communiste under the leadership of Alain Krivine , Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber as the French section of the Fourth International , which is in the tradition of Leon Trotsky , and has been subject to a brief ban in 1973 (after which it briefly renamed Front communiste révolutionnaire - FCR - called) today's name.

The traditional French Communist Party ( Parti communiste français ) was unattractive for the revolting youth, which triggered a veritable state crisis in France in May 68 , due to its bureaucratic-authoritarian structures and its orientation towards the parliamentary path to socialism ; For its part, the PCF deeply distrusted the “petty-bourgeois” radicals and even tried to prevent the beginning solidarity of young workers in particular with the student revolt . In this situation Maoism and Trotskyism could gain influence on the newer left .

The relatively flexible and not very dogmatic interpretation of Trotskyism, represented by the Brussels Secretariat of the Fourth International and its leading theorist Ernest Mandel , exerted a strong pull on intellectuals . Trotskyism is consistently internationalist , but it did not justify the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Mandel's direction allowed (in contrast to versions of Trotskyism, which only accept pure workers' revolutions ) a critical solidarity with revolutions in the Third World (China, Cuba) and showed clear sensitivity for new questions outside the purely economic antithesis of wage labor and capital ( feminism , Ecology , etc.). The Fourth International always tried to promote a revolutionary alternative to capitalism and Stalinism .

Despite the spectacular performances with which the predecessor organizations of the LCR caused a sensation in 1968, these efforts were unsuccessful for a long time. In the 70s and 80s she did not get beyond a marginal existence. After 1990 the LCR began to gain importance. The collapse of “ real socialism ” in Eastern Europe triggered a deep disorientation among the traditional “Moscow loyal” communists of the PCF. The situation, in which every alternative to capitalism was widely viewed as discredited, initially also caused difficulties for the LCR, although the LCR always had an extremely critical relationship with the lost states of the East. However, it was able to recover from the crisis better than the PCF, which tended towards parliamentary reformism. The LCR was heavily involved in the anti-racist and anti-fascist movements against the right-wing extremist Le Pen. Many of its members participated in the development of the new left-wing union movement Union syndicale Solidaires , which, as grassroots democracy and alliances of the workers' movement with ecological, feminist and anti-racist initiatives, is an alternative to the unions classified as bureaucratic, especially in the public service sector.

In terms of electoral policy, the LCR mainly relied on alliances with the more successful other Trotskyist party LO ( Lutte Ouvrière , workers' struggle ) in the course of the 1990s . In contrast to the LCR, the LO concentrated for a long time exclusively on company and trade union work and was thus able to gain a base in the workforce, especially in the crisis-ridden industrial regions. Her charismatic spokesperson, Arlette Laguiller , gained growing popularity in presidential campaigns. However, fundamental differences between LO and LCR could not be overcome. In terms of its social composition, the LCR is a party of educated middle classes. Unlike the LO, its supporters consist less of the traditional industrial workers milieu, but mainly of wage earners in the public service, in the health and education system, declassified and proletarianized intelligentsia and politically engaged youth.

In 2002 , the previously unknown 27-year-old Olivier Besancenot ran for the LCR as a candidate for the presidential election and achieved a sensational 4.3 percent of the vote (approx. 1,450,000 votes). (The long-known Arlette Laguiller from the LO got 5.7 percent.) Besancenot studied history, works for the post office as a postman and is an activist of the left-wing alternative postal union SUD-PTT. He is undoubtedly a typical representative of the LCR milieu: young and, despite a high level of education, not socially established.

With the slogan Our life is worth more than its profit , the LCR is heavily involved in the movement critical of globalization . It has opened up ideologically, it is no longer a purely Trotskyist party, but also regards libertarian and council-communist traditions as legitimate elements of the re-formation of a non-Stalinist revolutionary movement that relies on self-organization instead of bureaucracies and apparatuses. Besanzenot has criticized some of Trotsky's positions, such as his advocacy of the militarization of labor. The suppression of the Kronstadt uprising against the Bolsheviks (1921) led by Trotsky is now viewed as extremely controversial in the LCR. In its program in November 2003, the LCR replaced the term dictatorship of the proletariat with the historically less burdened demand for “workers' power” and “socialist democracy”.

The LCR, which currently has an estimated 3,000 members, is striving to form a new, larger organization of the anti-capitalist left and has therefore made offers to merge with both the LO and the PCF stream of refondateurs (new founders). These efforts have so far been unsuccessful because the refondateurs do not want to separate from the PCF and the LO is only willing to re-form on a strictly Trotskyist basis, which contradicts the more open objectives of the LCR.

In the first round of the 2007 presidential election , LCR candidate Olivier Besancenot achieved a similar result as in 2002 with 1,498,581 votes (4.08%). An “anti-neoliberal unity candidacy ”, which the LCR was also striving for, was due to differences between the Forces involved in the discussion (including the PCF) did not materialize, some prominent LCR members such as the economist Michel Husson then left the party or called for the election of José Bové , like Christophe Aguiton .

Web links

Commons : Ligue communiste révolutionnaire  - S

• LCR and weekly Rouge : http://www.lcr-rouge.org
• LCR Congress resolves to found a new Critical Articles Party on wsws.org

swell

1. ↑ "Dissolution officielle de la LCR pour créer le Nouveau parti anticapitaliste" ( Memento of January 24, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ), Agence France Presse, February 5, 2009
2. ↑ http://inprekorr.de/ipk426.pdf , pp. 3-19.