Founded in the 1960s, the Revolutionary Communist League has seen the profile of its members evolve since April 21, 2002. Florence Johsua, retracing the history of this party and its transformations, shows that the downgrading and the economic crisis have constituted new reasons to campaign.
This fascinating book, based on a political science thesis, traces the history of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in France, from the 1960s to the 2000s. From a historical sociology perspective, at the crossroads of the sociology of commitment and that of political parties, Florence Johsua seeks to understand the changes and permanence of a partisan organization and activism within it. It thus documents the transformations of activist commitment in a current plunged, since the end of the 1970s, into a long-term crisis. From the case of the LCR“it is about reporting on a minority and universal adventure: the challenge to the established order” (p. 10).
“Less great evenings than needy early mornings”
Questioning the model of the “professional revolutionary” (p. 161), emergence of new demands, transformation of militant practices: changes in anti-capitalist commitment are analyzed by situating them over the long term of the evolution of a party policy. The author thus adopts an interactionist perspective which “considers activism as a process inscribed in time, non-linear, fruit of the permanent interaction between the political and social context and the dispositions of the actors” (p. 12). The considerable investigation she conducted from 2002 to 2010 aims to understand “how anti-capitalist commitment was produced and reproduced” (p. 12). His interest in this subject is linked to his own biographical trajectory, marked by “a family framework saturated with political dispositions” (p. 16), his parents being historical activists of the LCR.
The combination of several survey methods (statistics, interviews, observations and archives) takes on its full meaning here. The review of membership cards and the administration of questionnaires during national and local congresses make it possible to establish a precise sociography of activists and to reconstruct individual trajectories. On this basis, Florence Johsua carried out “life story” type interviews with 45 party activists and leaders. Through this comprehensive approach to commitment, it captures the factors of entry and loyalty to the LCRbut also the output logics. Ethnographic observations in two Parisian sections provide additional information on the functioning of the organization from the inside, “at the level of daily activist practices”. Finally, the analysis of written sources (doctrinal corpus, party press, iconographic documents, etc.) provides information on the evolution of strategic positions and theoretical referents.
This investigation protocol allows us to understand the transformations of a political party which, far from being homogeneous, is made up of “a stack of layers of commitment linked to the periods of entry of its members” (p. 13) . Florence Johsua identifies a major turning point in the second half of the 1970s, accentuated after the victory of the left in May 1981, with a shift in the balance of power to the disadvantage of revolutionary organizations. Many activists of the LCR are then destabilized in the face of the evolution of the political situation, as one of them underlines in an interview: “What is a revolutionary party in a situation which is not? » (p. 112). The author shows that “the farewell to the Big Night” results in a withdrawal towards short-term objectives, that is to say immediate and concrete proposals which allow the activists to feel credible, for lack of being able to oppose an alternative social project to the capitalist system. The members of the LCR are also developing strategies for militant reconversion in associations and unions, notably investing in the alter-globalization movement. This change in the public image and modes of intervention of their party favored the entry of new activists from 2002.
Political engagement in times of crisis
After the first round of the presidential election and the shock of April 21, the numbers of the LCR have almost doubled. The organization, which has thus been profoundly renewed and rejuvenated, has also become socially and ideologically less homogeneous. While the activists of the LCR were until then massively integrated into the labor market and strongly endowed with cultural capital, a quarter being teachers, the new activists are mainly young workers who are experiencing problematic professional integration. Unlike the activists who joined the LCR from 1968 and have often experienced social ascension compared to their parents, the trajectories of newcomers are characterized by different forms of downgrading. The social recruitment of the organization is disrupted: “This persistent under-representation of popular categories is paradoxical for a political organization which has chased the working class throughout its history, without ever reaching it. Until she herself comes to meet the LCRin 2002” (p. 75).
The chapter entitled “rethinking the social production of revolt”, which had already been the subject of an article in the French journal of political science in 2013, establishes a link between the experience of decommissioning and the process of politicization. Florence Johsua proposes to analyze the social logics of the protest, while integrating the criticisms addressed to approaches in terms of relative frustration. It shows how experiences of downgrading can contribute to transforming the representations of the social world of those who experience them. These misadjustments in their journey “are likely to reveal (to them) the arbitrariness of the social world and its classifications”, thus encouraging them to question “what goes without saying” (p. 87).
This thesis goes against “existing work on the biographical consequences of downward social mobility of individuals and groups (which) essentially highlights its effects in terms of xenophobia and relative attraction to the extreme right, or even withdrawal reflecting low political participation” (p. 93). Certainly, these precarious commitments are fragile and come into tension with those of older activists, sometimes disconcerted by the lack of knowledge of new recruits with regard to the history of the party and its identity references. But the new memberships of 2002 also show that the economic crisis can favor forms of mobilization “on the basis of universalist and left-oriented values”. According to the author, these entries are “the fruit of the encounter between protesting dispositions and a form of commitment, which gives meaning to these social experiences to transform them into revolt” (p. 90). The organization plays a crucial role here, by highlighting the figure of Olivier Besancenot, a 27-year-old postman who embodies this precarious youth and develops a combative discourse. The evolution of the LCR since 2002 could thus shed light on some of the current logics of engagement in times of crisis.
A “radical left”?
This book therefore not only offers a very detailed analysis of the history of the LCRbut it also provides avenues for understanding current political and social movements. By studying the social production of the revolt, Florence Johsua makes the link with Arab revolutionary situations, marked by the role of educated youth confronted with the problems of employment and social integration. It also invites us to “question the development of precarious living situations at the heart of rich economies, hit by the crisis and by budgetary and social austerity policies, and its effects in the genesis of protest dispositions” ( p.94). The conclusion of the book thus affirms that the economic crisis of 2008 “gave new relevance to this project of political alternative” and that “new political forces (…) are renewing in their own way the contours of a radical left” (p. 242). The author cites the access to power of Syriza in Greece in 2015 and the rise to power of Podemos in Spain since 2014.
However, presenting these parties as a revival of the “radical left” does not always allow us to understand the reasons for their success. It is precisely by turning our back on this qualifier, by refusing slogans like that of LCR “100% on the left”, that a party like Podemos has formed. If we find among its founders activists ofIzquierda anticapitalistathe Spanish section of the fourth international, and disappointed withIzquierda Unida (left-wing coalition formed around the Spanish Communist Party), most leaders and activists now refuse to define themselves as “anti-capitalists”. Understanding the emergence and success of some of these new parties therefore requires revisiting their breaks with the discourse and vocabulary traditionally held by the “radical left”.
On the other hand, one of the keys to understanding to trace the genesis of Podemos lies in the Latin American experiences, surprisingly passed over in silence in this work. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, left-wing activists often looked to this region of the world to renew their hopes and references. With the exception of a footnote on Brazilian participatory budgets, there is a total impasse on governments that put forward a “socialism of the XXIe century”, an expression taken up at the conclusion of the book. Were Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Evo Morales’ Bolivia and Rafael Correa’s Ecuador seen as a source of inspiration for the members of the LCR ? The author says nothing about it.
The work also offers few clues to understand the failure of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) mentioned in the introduction: five years after April 21, 2002, the LCR“boosted by the influx of activists and by the public and media visibility from which it has benefited, proposes to found a new anti-capitalist party. (…) With nearly 10,000 members at the time of its founding, the NPA there are only 2000 left in 2015” (p. 8 and p. 10). “The failure of the company” is then underlined, but how can we explain it? Florence Johsua quickly evokes the return of orthodox revolutionary currents, which were “a very minority within the LCR (and) have strengthened themselves within the framework of NPAsignificantly shifting its center of gravity and destabilizing many of its artisans” (p. 155). Is this the only factor explaining the militant hemorrhage of a party which had nevertheless succeeded in attracting new categories of the population? How is it that the influx of activists in 2002 was accompanied, a dozen years later, by such a brutal withdrawal? It would be interesting to delve deeper into the logic of disengagement, taken into account but less documented in the book than the processes of new commitments from 2002 onwards.
If a few questions remain unanswered, Anticapitalistes is a remarkable book, which keeps the reader in suspense throughout and constitutes a considerable contribution to the sociology of commitment.