Pabloite NPA supports pro-war New Popular Front in early elections in France
By joining the New Popular Front, formed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Inconcès party and the pro-business Socialist Party (PS) after President Emmanuel Macron called new elections for July 7, the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) has once again exposed itself as a tool of imperialism, pushing workers into the political trap set by Mélenchon and former PS President François Hollande to intensify the war against Russia abroad and the class struggle at home.
The NPA justifies its support for this alliance by saying that it will strengthen the unity of the left against the threat of a takeover by the neo-fascist Rassemblement National (RN). The RN now enjoys growing support in the ruling class, particularly in the Republicans (LR) faction led by Eric Ciotti, which is calling for alliances with the RN. The NPA explains:
“At a time when the RN and its allies are in a position to take power, the Popular Front gives hope to the social and political left, against neoliberal reforms, for the anti-racist, ecological, feminist and LGBTI struggle and for all movements for equality. …
“Victory against the extreme right and Macron is only possible under the condition of a broad mobilization of the population, especially in workplaces, in popular neighborhoods and among young people. The trade union movement, the environmental struggles, the feminist movement, the solidarity movement with Palestine, the decolonial and anti-racist struggles must deeply nourish the program of the Popular Front. They must represent its living force.”
But the New Popular Front is not a great hope for the left. By supporting it, the NPA is participating in the right-wing restructuring of the ruling establishment that Macron wants to implement with the new elections. Macron called his new elections for July 7, shortly after British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called new elections for July 4, in order to prepare the ruling establishment for a massive escalation of the war against Russia and the class struggle at home.
The newly elected governments of Britain and France will send representatives to the NATO summit in Washington on July 9, which is preparing to send troops to Ukraine for war against Russia – a policy that Macron has repeatedly advocated. NATO’s war calendar effectively dictates the electoral calendar in France and Britain, as well as the political maneuvers of the NPA.
The NPA’s claim that the New Popular Front is fed by anti-colonial struggles is a political lie. It is an alliance with forces like Hollande, an unashamed enemy of the working class who brutally suppressed social protests at home and waged neo-colonial wars from Syria to Mali. The New Popular Front’s program includes building up the French military police and intelligence service and sending troops to Ukraine, supposedly as “peacekeepers.”
The New Popular Front is not the Popular Front of 1934-1938. The Popular Front was, it must be said, not an anti-colonial force. It was an alliance of Stalinist and social democratic parties with the liberal bourgeois Radical Party. The price of the alliance with the Radicals was not only the renunciation of the socialist revolution, but also the toleration of French rule over its then huge colonial empire, which stretched from Indochina to Syria and Algeria. The Popular Front was nevertheless far to the left of the New Popular Front.
Unlike its predecessor in the 1930s, the New Popular Front today is not a party with a mass working-class base. It does not even claim to propose major social reforms such as the eight-hour day or paid holidays. It is a pro-war alliance that, if it forms a government under Macron’s presidency, would drastically reduce workers’ living standards in order to rearm France and prepare it for an “intense war” with Russia.
In the 1930s, the Trotskyist movement was able to draw on the mass working class base of French social democracy and openly carry out political work against imperialism, colonialism and capitalism.
The NPA’s decision today to join the New Popular Front testifies to its deep-rooted hostility to Trotskyism. It is joining an alliance with the PS, a party of big business founded in 1971 and since then one of the main governing parties of French imperialism.
The PS’s leading candidate in this month’s European elections, Raphaël Glucksmann, publicly denied the genocide in Gaza and called for Ukraine to be armed against Russia. In fact, the PS is at the heart of the imperialist war plot in Ukraine. Under Hollande, for whom Macron was economy minister, the PS worked with Washington and Berlin to overthrow the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in a far-right coup. That coup sparked a conflict in Ukraine that is now rapidly escalating into nuclear war.
The NPA’s open alliance with the PS is the result of its support for the military adventures of French imperialism and NATO since its creation in 2009, based on an explicit rejection of Trotskyism. It supported the wars in Libya, Syria and Mali, as well as the coup in Ukraine in 2014. Shortly after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war two years ago, NPA leader Olivier Besancenot travelled to Ukraine. Upon his return to France, he propagated NATO’s rearmament of the Ukrainian regime and the financial sanctions against Russia as anti-fascist resistance, declaring:
“We know that the Ukrainians are demanding arms supplies, especially defensive weapons that will give them control of the skies. Those we have spoken to there stress that they do not intend for forces other than their own to replace the Ukrainian resistance movement. On the issue of economic sanctions, we are fighting for sanctions against the oligarchs, but we are still far from that. In Britain and Cyprus, we have achieved only one percent of what could be done.”
This war drama against Russia is a pack of lies that exposes the anti-fascist pretenses of the NPA and the entire New Popular Front. The Ukrainian regime is not a democratic, anti-fascist regime, but a far-right dictatorship. President Volodymyr Zelensky has suspended elections and rules on the basis of a network of secret services and far-right militias led by agents loyal to the memory of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Workers and youth can only look to the history of the great struggles of the Trotskyist movement when the NPA presents its war policy in Ukraine as “hope for the left.” There is a class divide between the Pabloite support for the NATO wars and the Trotskyist opposition of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to both NATO imperialism and the post-Soviet capitalist regime in Russia.
Pabloism emerged in 1953 from an international split with the ICFI, the defenders of the continuity of Trotskyism. Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel rejected the Marxist notion of the working class as an independent revolutionary force and called for the Trotskyist movement to dissolve into Stalinist, social democratic or bourgeois nationalist movements. After the dissolution of the USSR by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991, which the Pabloites had previously portrayed as revolutionary, they focused on supporting imperialist wars, which suited the interests of their wealthy middle class.
The development of the NPA since its foundation in 2009 – during which the Pabloites supported their predecessor, the Revolutionary Communist League –confirmed the assessment of the ICFI that it presented at the time to the WSWS. In 2009, it stated:
The real aim of the LCR in its self-liquidation is in fact Trotsky’s political legacy: the insistence on the complete political independence of the working class, revolutionary internationalism and an irreconcilable rejection of collaboration with the bourgeois state, the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies and all varieties of bourgeois nationalism and petty-bourgeois radicalism.
The LCR’s choice of anti-capitalism as its guiding ideology is, in the context of European and particularly French politics, a huge step backwards and to the right, towards the cheapest coin in the country. Politically non-specific, it encompasses all forms of social discontent, regardless of class base or orientation. This term can be adopted by large sections of the petty bourgeoisie, both left and right – from the anarchism advocated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the mid-19th century to the violent right-wing populist protests of Pierre Poujade in the mid-20th century.
NATO and Macron’s escalation against Russia will provoke explosive mass resistance. Polls in February showed that 68 percent of French people reject Macron’s demand to send troops to Ukraine. A poll by the Eurasia Group found that 88 percent of Western Europeans reject escalation and want a negotiated solution to the Ukraine war. But these events are a dire warning. A movement against war and dictatorship can only be built from below, by mobilizing workers independently of union bureaucracies linked to pseudo-left parties like the NPA.
The political basis of such a movement is the struggle for Trotskyism against Stalinism and the New Popular Front. This requires, above all, the building of the Party of Socialist Equality (PES), the French section of the ICFI, as a Trotskyist opposition to the New Popular Front and the NPA. Just as there can be no socialism without democracy, there will be no democracy without the Trotskyist struggle of the workers in France and worldwide for socialism.
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