That’s true, but of course if you want to work with the CP you’ll struggle to separate them from the SP, since they make so many electoral pacts.

I can see now that the phrase used in the article – “objections to running joint electoral lists with the Parti Socialiste and Parti Communiste Français” – is ambiguously worded – the point is that L’Étincelle were critical of LO tailing the “union of the left” which comprises of both the CP and SP.

Another point.

Basically l’Etincelle, during all these years, has not defined positions which are very different from LO. As most people who are impressed by LO’s claim to have a trotskyist-proletarian line (as I was 34 years ago) they have not been able to define a separate original position on most political questions. The fact that they still cling to trotskyism, leninism, etc., has not enabled them to appear as very different from the majority even if they were less sectarian and more sensitive to new movements.
We have had the same kind of experience with Combat communiste in 1974, even if we were “state caps” and had some more original positions on the trade unions and socialist propaganda, we were seen by most people as just a microscopic LO. So most good working class militants prefer not to loose time in small tendencies or small groups.
that’s an unpleasant reality but it has to be faced.
The fact that the LCR may grow (it remains to be seen if they are effectively growing) is linked to the fact that they want to recruit people who not only are not attracted by trotskyism and marxism and leninism and all that “old” stuff, but also people who are really repelled by all that. Read the discussion forums of the new NPA or the interviews published in the last Critique communiste from young militants (not the Old Guard or those coming from other groups) and you will have a flavour of their ideology: basically the average no global-reformist stuff “let’s share the wealth”, they all say.
So here is the dilemma: you go on trying to build a leninist trotskyist sect or you build a very large and confused party which will spend a lot of time in electoral politics as Besancenot has already announced and as LO and then the LCR have been doing for many years with very small results, apart from very important state subsidies (each vote gives you 1,5 €)
A very grey perspective, indeed.

Small wonder that Barta disavowed LO.

In a perverse way and within its own crazy logic this does make sense – their claim that the USSR was a workers’ state (albeit degenerated) even after the soviets and all vestiges of working-class organisation were smashed is partly based on the idea of the “collective memory” of the revolution rather than anything to do with the economic system… so why should that not continue after 1991? The working class had lost power many decades beforehand anyway…