Letter from France

Below we reproduce the reply of the former CRI group of France to an article published in Socialismo o Barbarie, paper of the New MAS of Argentina. At present the CRI is part of the CLAIRE tendency of the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) of France. The letter was motivated by the publication of an article in issue 145 of Socialismo o Barbarie about the NPA project, in which the fact that the CRI is a sympathising section of the FT-CI was omitted.

Dear comrades,

We have read your article on the NPA congress that appeared in your paper dated January 19. In it you report in particular on the analysis and debate promoted by the signatories to the Project of the Tendency Defending Communism, Revolution and Self-Organisation, which on February 14 became the CLAIRE tendency (For Communism, Self-Organised Struggle, Internationalist and Revolutionary) of the NPA.

You have translated into Spanish and published the initial declaration of the project of the tendency and given your political support to it, for which we are very grateful. You correctly say that the CRI group (Communist, Revolutionary, Internationalist – http://groupecri.free.fr) proposed the tendency. But you do not say that the CRI group in France is a sympathising section of the FT-CI (of which the PTS is the Argentinean section). We would be very grateful if you would clarify this important point for your militants and readership.

We would also like to ask you to make clear that the CRI group dissolved itself on February 13, 2009. Its members are now part of the CLAIRE tendency along with other militants, some of them originally members of the LCR (which dissolved on February 5), one of them related to your organisation, and some who didn’t belong to any organisation before the launch of the NPA.

But as was stated by the militants of the former CRI group in their resolution to dissolve, they remain sympathisers of the FT-CI and are proposing to the entire CLAIRE tendency of the NPA “the opening-up of discussions on and with the FT-CI, with the aim that the CLAIRE tendency establishes a closer relationship – to be defined – with this international organisation.

Paris, February 23, 2009

“We Shouldn’t Let this Stop Us”: Suspended Columbia Student Activist Speaks Out

Aidan Parisi, a student at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, was recently suspended and has been threatened with eviction from their graduate student housing for pro-Palestinian activism on campus. Aidan talked to Left Voice about the state of repression, the movement at Columbia, and the path forward for uniting the student movement with the labor movement and other movements against oppression.