Issuing body: Michel Pablo, as rapporteur, replying to the debate on the resolution of the Ninth Plenum (including the declaration of the delegates of the French majority, Bleibtreu and Marin)
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Conclusion of the Rapporteur
In his reply, the rapporteur insisted, among other things, on the following points:
a) That our particular interest in the workers and the masses under Stalinist influence in no way means that we neglect the workers and masses who are outside that influence. In a whole broad category of countries (enumerated, moreover, both in the theses and in the resolution and the report), the essential work is not directed toward the Communist parties.
b) That on the question of the defence of the USSR, understood as a strategic line and not as a simple slogan in itself, it is naturally necessary to take into account, in tactical application, the particular conditions of each country — as in Germany, for example, where a very large category of workers are hostile to any idea of the defence of the USSR, a defence which they confuse with that of the Kremlin and of Stalinism. But nowhere is it a question of abandoning our principled struggle on this question, nor of yielding to pressures, nor of adapting to the easiest conditions of work. It is a matter of finding the best tactical means of presenting the question of the defence of the USSR by linking it to the general struggle of the masses, and of introducing it according to the forms and moments most propitious for advancing the masses' understanding of this question.
c) The struggle of the masses against war preparations, their reactions and their possible successes — not only in the United States but equally in Asia and in Europe — will naturally have an influence on the timing of the war and on the conditions in which it would break out. The more the masses react against war preparations, the more the imperialists will find themselves obliged to re-examine, readjust and even completely modify certain of their military plans, and to commit definitively to the struggle under the worst possible conditions. Hence the major interest in having the revolutionary struggle of the masses develop to the utmost as of now.
d) Our understanding of the inevitability of the war, of its transformation into international civil war, that is, into revolution, does not mean that we should not take account, in our propaganda and agitation, in our press, etc., of the masses' aspirations for peace, against war. In all our activity toward the broad layers, we must start from their concerns in order to turn them against war preparations, insisting (especially when we are dealing with masses influenced by Stalinism) that the best way to fight against the imperialists' war is to fight, as of now, for workers' power.
e) Our assessment of the character that a war unleashed by imperialism against the workers' states and the colonial revolutions will necessarily assume — given a relationship of forces that remains unfavourable to imperialism, transforming itself from the outset into international civil war — does not mean that everywhere, or at the same moment, or with the same intensity, the war will turn into civil war. It means that the fundamental, dominant tendency will be one of transformation into international civil war. We must place the emphasis not on the particular, the exceptional or the secondary, but on the general and the dominant trait. We shall not fix a political line otherwise.
The rapporteur concluded his report by addressing the French delegates at length, and by insisting on the necessity and the possibility of an agreement concerning the essential work that the French section must carry out toward the Stalinist workers.