(French section of the Fourth International)
Issuing body: International Secretariat of the Fourth International Addressed to: Central Committee of the PCI (Parti Communiste Internationaliste, French section of the Fourth International)
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Dear comrades,
The International Secretariat wishes to draw your attention to the importance of the decisions you are called upon to make at this January 1952 session. What is at stake is your relationship with the international Trotskyist movement.
At your previous session, of 29 and 30 September 1951, you undertook to follow the line laid down by the Third World Congress with "understanding and discipline." Nearly five months have now passed since the world congress, and we tell you plainly that your party's PB [Political Bureau], particularly in recent weeks, and more especially in the texts it is proposing that you adopt, shows that it intends to continue the fight against the orientation decided by the sovereign body of our international organization, and against its leadership.
The political report before you, which concludes with the tasks and orientation pursued by the PB, notably in the matter of work in the trade unions and in the organizations controlled by the Stalinists, is, so far as the analysis and perspectives of the world situation are concerned, in contradiction with the documents adopted by the Third World Congress. The report submitted to you does not define a perspective of world war within a relatively short time, but, almost entirely ignoring the international relationship of forces, sketches a perspective of American imperialism placed in an economy that is merely "preparatory to a war economy," and frightened by inflation and by the Soviet bureaucracy, both of them in search of a compromise... The orientation and the tasks defined in the PB's report conform to this perspective, but not to the analysis and perspective defined by the world congress.
At the time of the Third World Congress, the majority of delegates had taken seriously the promise of the delegates of the PCI majority that they would apply the line defined by that congress. The SI [International Secretariat] had been charged by the congress with following this application and taking all measures to that end: "Should it turn out that the French leadership does not live up to this hope [of loyally applying the line of the international], the CEI [International Executive Committee] and the SI shall be charged with taking all organizational measures to set the situation in the party right." We would have understood if errors, even serious ones, had been committed by the PB, for it is obviously difficult to apply a policy one has violently fought; had there been on the part of the PB a willingness to understand and apply the line of the international, we could certainly have succeeded, without great difficulty, in jointly correcting the errors committed. But that is not what we have been faced with, particularly in recent weeks. We have met with a constant struggle waged without candour against the line of the international. It was the PB majority itself that appealed to the SI for arbitration to determine who was right, itself or the minority, on trade-union matters, in relation to the line of the world congress. But as soon as the SI gave its opinion, the PB majority cried out that the SI was in opposition to the world congress, and rejected the SI's text on the reorientation of our trade-union work in France.
The high point of this campaign of denigration is the revival of the charge of "liquidationism" and "capitulation to Stalinism" — a charge made verbally before the Seventh Congress of the party, never put in writing for the whole international, never formulated before the world congress, and now taken up again in these last few weeks. If the SI truly wanted to "liquidate" the French organization and were capitulating to Stalinism, it would be the most elementary duty to make this known to the whole international. The tribune of the CM [World Congress] should have been used for that purpose, especially since it was precisely the members of the SI who, at that congress, most particularly formulated the positions that triumphed there. What does this silence within the international mean, and this attempt to mobilize the French party around these accusations? Where can it lead, regardless of the intentions of those who launch them?
These accusations against our international have been levelled more particularly in connection with the positions adopted by the CM, and echo those made by the Yugoslavs, by the POUM, by Shachtman, and also by Natalia Sedova in order to break with our movement. Such an attitude has its own logic. If one thinks that we are capitulating to Stalinism, then in order to break with Stalinism, one will break with us. If one thinks that we are capitulating to Stalinism, one will attribute to us the worst Stalinist methods — and already a member of the PB has written an article, which the PB is in the process of publishing, accusing us of veritable crimes against our own movement.
We are living through a period in which immense forces are being exerted on every man and every organization. The best resistance we can offer to these dissolving forces is the cohesion of our organization, the world party of the socialist revolution. How can one imagine that the most responsible militants of our international movement, gathered at its congress — some of whom have spent more than twenty-five years fighting Stalinism — were incapable of discerning "capitulation to Stalinism" in the positions set out before them by the members of the SI? How is it that they trusted the members of the SI to once again assume, in an exceedingly grave period, the highest responsibilities in our movement? How is it that only in France were a few more clear-sighted Trotskyists to be found — who, moreover, did not use the tribune of the CM to denounce this danger? In reality, France is perhaps the country where antagonistic forces cross with the greatest violence, where the weight of the petty-bourgeois strata is enormous, and where the bourgeoisie itself is most strikingly torn apart. In our French section we are witnessing a reflection of these tears and contradictions within French society. And this is why the path on which the PB majority has embarked is extremely perilous. It finds itself adrift, and its growing estrangement from the international now risks leading it to a break with the international.
Patiently, methodically, the SI has striven since the Third World Congress to collaborate with your PB, in particular in order to arrive at an understanding and effective application of the line of the international in France. A first text of application was thus worked out by the joint commission of representatives of the SI and of your PB. This text was naturally only a first step on the road to understanding the line of the third world congress, as it was defined explicitly and implicitly in the texts of that congress and as it is understood by the international leadership. In order to reach an initial agreement with your leadership — which was still violently opposed, in the very aftermath of the Third World Congress, to the line of the international — the representatives of the SI deliberately confined all the implications of this line to a small number of ideas and proposals, on which they strove to obtain your understanding and your consent.
This first text of application was intended to bring about the passage from your former positions to the positions of the international, and thereby to ensure the party's turn in the manner best suited to facilitate your understanding and to spare friction. But precisely for that reason, this text remained incomplete and limited, and could not, as an exclusive text, correspond to the whole dynamic of the evolving situation and its logic. It soon became apparent that certain questions imperatively posed by the evolution of the situation in France, implicit in the line of the third CM and now in the process of becoming concrete, needed to be further clarified. The trade-union discussion which the situation forced upon you, through the evolution of Unité, the proposals of the CGT, and the prospect of new struggles, was already, by its own logic, overflowing the narrow framework of the first document of application, and converging in an even more concrete way on the fundamental question of our orientation and our tactics in France: what does it mean to orient oneself toward the Stalinist organizations and workers, how is one to work within them. The answers the PB gave to this question during the trade-union discussion, the manner in which it received, criticized, and then rejected our resolution "For the Reorientation of Our Trade-Union Work in France," as well as the answers contained in the draft political resolution it proposes that you adopt, prove to us that fundamentally it has remained wedded to the same conception of work formulated by the Seventh Congress of the PCI, and not to the assessment and the conceptions of the international.
What it continues to seek is to strengthen the PCI as an independent organization and to set it up, as such, from the outside, against the Stalinist organizations and party, as the principal political pole for the immediate regroupment of the revolutionary forces of the French proletariat. It seeks, through independent action and the creation of "positions of strength" labelled Trotskyist, in the factories, the trade unions, etc., to prove to the Stalinist workers that there exists, in the immediate term, another political and organizational path than that of their own organizations, and consequently that there exists, in the immediate term, in France, the possibility of a "new" revolutionary "leadership." We shall find an echo, it says, among the Stalinist workers to the extent that we act independently, openly as Trotskyists, and become strong. This is the meaning both of the Dumont-Lambert draft and, more particularly, of several passages contained in the draft resolution "On the French Situation and the Tasks of the Party."
Now, this orientation — which was more or less the one the party pursued up to the congress of the international, and which does indeed correspond to the logic of any fundamentally independent work, aimed fundamentally at the immediate, present construction of the independent party through open and independent action — is not the orientation of the turn in this matter that the line of the Third Congress traces and implies.
In order for you to come to understand what the international currently demands in France — and to the extent that what is involved is merely confusion and not a deliberate, conscious struggle against the implications of the line of the international — you must make the effort to conceive what the work of our organization in France could and should be if, in place of a Stalinist movement so strong, so much a majority within the class, there existed instead a reformist movement of the same importance, placed in the same objective conditions, and driven, independently of the will and plans of its leadership, toward increased radicalization.
Would you, in that case, hold exactly the same conception of the immediate construction of the independent party — or would you, in keeping with the now general experience of our movement in this matter and the more precise orientation of the CM, be led to integrate ourselves everywhere into the real mass movement, to act from within that movement with tactics and means suited to that kind of work? Would it be so difficult for you, in such a case, to understand the necessity of flexibility, of language appropriate to the workers of such a milieu, and even of the use — absolutely necessary on occasion — of certain ruses, in order to be able to integrate ourselves under the best possible conditions into that movement, to outwit the plans of its bureaucratic leadership, and to remain within it? Would you then believe in "liquidationism," in "capitulation," or in the inadmissible notion of "ruse" as a political programme? In that case, the current policy of the international in several countries — England, Belgium, Austria, etc. — is nothing else.
In France, what the international demands is closely akin to an entrist policy with respect to the Stalinist organizations and movements. This work therefore involves tactics and means suited to its particular nature, which are naturally not those of fundamentally independent work. The international has repeatedly set out — both in the resolutions and texts of the Third World Congress and in the texts giving concrete form to the line to be applied in France, and more especially in its resolution "For a Reorientation of Our Trade-Union Work in France" — the considerations from which flows the necessity of such work directed toward the Stalinist organizations and workers. It is not merely because the movement under Stalinist influence in France constitutes, by far, the most important expression of the real mass movement of this country that it is necessary for us to orient ourselves above all toward this movement, to integrate ourselves into it, and to work within it.
It is because this movement is, moreover, placed in such objective conditions — through the evolution of the international situation toward a counter-revolutionary war of allied imperialism — that, independently of the plans and the will of its bureaucratic leadership in the service of Kremlin policy, it will be forced, compelled, to radicalize further, to sketch out in practice a revolutionary orientation, and to act, in the event of war, weapons in hand, for power. The whole tactic that the international advocates toward the movements under Stalinist influence, in the countries where these movements are by far the majority movements of the class, is indissolubly bound, at the present stage, to the nature of these movements, to the manner in which they will be compelled to react under present concrete conditions, and to the perspective of revolution.
When our movement in the past, between 1929 and 1938, first raised the question of united action with the socialist organizations and workers, and then the question of work inside the socialist movement, it proceeded precisely from the "objective conditions in which that movement was placed" (from which precise, inevitable consequences resulted), and not from "psychological" or "moral" criteria concerning the desires, capacities, or plans of the petty-bourgeois social-democratic leadership.
A series of arguments now being used against the orientation demanded by the international in France, we have already met, fought, and rejected in analogous forms, during that past experience of our movement. Against the Stalinists of that time, and against comrades — even within our own ranks — who did not understand the necessity, the nature, the perspectives, and the manner of carrying on work directed toward and inside the socialist movement, and who argued on the basis of social democracy's supposed inability to fight fascism effectively, on the cowardice, the spinelessness, the opportunism of its leaders, etc., L. Trotsky opposed the Marxist method of analysing social democracy as placed in concrete conditions.
The same problem, in a sharper form and with more important, ampler revolutionary possibilities, confronts the Trotskyist organizations wherever we are dealing with a mass Stalinist movement placed under present concrete conditions.
Can one seriously deny that the Stalinist movement in France, for example, is placed, in face of the Cold War, in new conditions it has never known in the whole of its past, and that these conditions oblige it, compel it (and will compel it still further in future, for as long as the international situation continues to evolve toward war and is not reversed in the direction of "peace" — that is, of a broad and viable compromise between capitalism and the USSR, the "people's democracies," China) to act in practice in a certain manner, to radicalize (in its own fashion), to sketch out an orientation which, on more than one point, contrasts with the fundamentally rightward course of its policy in 1934-1947, and to rely more (in its own fashion) on the mobilization — that is, the active engagement — of the working class?
Is this not the deepest meaning of a whole series of manifestations of Stalinist policy in France which we have witnessed more particularly since the world congress: the CGT's proposals for united action to the other trade-union federations, the UJRF's proposals to youth organizations for joint action against the two years [of military service], the campaign of a secretary of the French CP — Fajon — preparing proposals for united action with the Socialist Party? Moreover, the Garaudy affair [1] shows that the situation is raising the most important political problems, right up to the highest Stalinist summits.
Faced with such a new situation, in which the Stalinist movement now finds itself placed for an entire period, and taking into account the immediate and long-term consequences of the evolution of this situation upon that movement, the international had the duty to define a precise policy in all the countries where it constitutes the majority movement of the proletariat. Let us define this policy once again, clearly: it is a matter of practising, in a country like France, an increasingly entrist policy sui generis with respect to the organizations and workers under Stalinist influence. This means that, as we draw closer to war, an ever-growing part of our forces must invest itself in the various political and trade-union organizations led or influenced by the Stalinists, including the PCF, remain within them, and work there according to a tactic adapted to the nature of each of these organizations and subordinated to the principle of long-term work. The independent sector of our organization will have as its principal task to facilitate both the understanding of our revolutionary line by the Stalinist workers, and our work inside their movement.
The whole of the internal and external work of the Trotskyist organization will thus have as its aim to accelerate the radicalization of the Stalinist workers and the development of a revolutionary leadership arising fundamentally from within their own movement, through the experience of the struggles to come and the tasks that these struggles will impose on the mass of Stalinist militants.
Let us now examine the various particular aspects of this orientation, without however claiming to exhaust the subject in this letter alone.
The experience the international is embarking upon in this field is, up to now, unique in its history, and working it out will require a certain amount of time, as well as the understanding and loyal collaboration of the leaderships of the sections involved in this work. We shall return further on to this crucial aspect of the question.
The first problem posed by such work directed toward, and inside, the Stalinist organizations and movement in general, is that of the manner of integrating oneself into that movement. This integration must begin with the peripheral organizations, so as to arrive eventually at the PCF itself. Exceptions to this progression are naturally possible, and even inevitable. Comrades designated by our leadership, taking into account their aptitudes and capacities for such work, will strive to integrate themselves into all the political, trade-union, cultural, etc., organizations and bodies which the PCF leads, influences, or promotes: Combattants de la paix [Peace Fighters], Henri Martin Committees, the UJRF, CGT unions, unified unions, unified trade-union sections, unity committees, etc. To achieve such a result, to remain within them and work there, it will be necessary, for a whole period at the outset, for our militants to completely camouflage their Trotskyist identity, or at least cease to stress it, undertaking no political work on the basis of our own ideas, and to make themselves known in their new milieu, above all, as the best organizers of all these bodies. It is only afterward, once they are solidly integrated into these milieux, once they have acquired the esteem and confidence of their fellow workers and the concrete knowledge of their milieu that this requires, that they will be able to know how best to act so as progressively to advance certain of our ideas, to intensify the radicalization of the Stalinist militants, to favour — always with flexibility — the positions and tendencies of the left, to identify the most combative and most interesting elements, and either work with them directly and individually, or refer them to our independent bodies.
Every Trotskyist militant, if he acquires this understanding of the work and is constantly assisted by his leadership, is capable of becoming the organizing spirit of a sector of work and of bringing to life, better than a Stalinist militant, a Henri Martin Committee, a unified trade-union section, a unity committee, etc. The argument that these bodies often exist only on paper, do not function, are skeletal, bureaucratic... etc., is not decisive.
In England, those who fought against entry into the Labour Party often argued that this party exists only as an electoral machine, without any defined, living structure, etc. In reality, they were exaggerating, owing to their total failure to understand how to work within that organization and to bring it to life. The experience gained since then by our comrades who carried out the entry has already demonstrated, in the most striking fashion, the possibility of such work and the surprising results that can be achieved with an adequate understanding of its specific nature.
The organizations and bodies which the PCF leads, influences, or promotes are infinitely more real, more alive, but naturally the bureaucratic control exercised over them is also stricter. It is absolutely possible for our militants to integrate themselves, to work, and to remain in these milieux, if at the outset they behave exactly as simple PCF militants and demonstrate their capacities for initiative, organization, and leadership. This is the sense of the attitude we advocated in the trade-union field in our resolution "For the Reorientation of Our Trade-Union Work in France."
Through this document we sought to draw the attention of the party leadership to the great possibilities offered by the conjuncture created in this field, following the CGT's proposals and the unity current developing within the class, for integrating ourselves into the CGT-affiliated unions, including into the leadership of the unitary trade-union bodies (unified trade-union sections, unity committees). This required that our comrades be willing — and, if necessary, capable — to use cunning with the Stalinist leaders, to show flexibility, to keep their Trotskyist identity in the background, and to put forward, above all, their capacity to apply a unitary line, to animate and lead the bodies that give it concrete form and that the Stalinist leadership itself wanted to see arise.
In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to work and to remain, for example, in the mass trade unions, "ruses" and "capitulations" are not merely permissible but necessary. We already learned this at the time of Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and the whole experience of the international in mass work, whether entrist or trade-union work, has enabled us to develop this understanding still further.
In order to be able to re-enter the CGT-affiliated unions once one has been expelled from them, or to re-enter some unitary trade-union body, one will not hesitate, if necessary, to sacrifice, for example, the sale of Unité or even of La Vérité, to place one's Trotskyist identity entirely in the background if the bureaucratic leaderships demand it and if we ourselves conclude that this is the condition for facilitating our integration. All these questions, we had believed, had long been perfectly clear to all the cadres of our movement. Let us continue.
If we have defined the policy the international intends to follow in France as a kind of entrist policy sui generis, this is because of the specific character of the Stalinist movement, whose extremely bureaucratic leadership prevents us from proceeding exactly as we would in a reformist movement of the same importance. Otherwise we would be — and would have been for a long time already — in favour of a policy of total entrism. The nature of the Stalinist movement in fact imposes upon us a combination of independent work and "entrist" work, with the following particularities: independent work must be understood as having for its principal purpose to assist entrist work, and it too is addressed primarily toward the Stalinist workers; entrist work will expand as we draw closer to war.
The independent sector assists entrist work by supplying it with personnel, directing it from outside, developing the themes of our policy and the concrete critique of Stalinist policy, etc., in an ample, clear manner, with no other limitations than those of language and form, which must be devised in such a way as to find a growing echo among Stalinist militants. The independent sector maintains all the current essential activities in the factories, the trade unions, among youth, and continues to recruit, including among the best elements identified within the Stalinist movement by our militants doing entrist work.
It may indeed be, even though our constant tendency will be to maintain and increase our forces inside the Stalinist movement (and this for a long period), that for certain elements who will have been identified to us within that movement, it will be preferable to complete their Trotskyist formation by affiliating them to the independent sector.
The independent sector will be made up of all the elements strictly necessary to direct the work as a whole, plus those who, for whatever reason, or despite all our efforts, cannot integrate themselves into the Stalinist movement, plus those whose Trotskyist formation we judge it preferable, or even necessary, to complete within the independent organization. Our independent militants will abandon no activity in the factories and the trade unions, in accordance with our ideas on united action, unity, the strategy of struggles, etc., nor any initiative to promote or lead bodies and struggles, wherever conditions permit them to do so, but they will always take care that this activity is carried out with regard to the whole of the work we are doing in France, and to the priority we accord above all to the Stalinist militants, to experiences made above all with them, and understood above all by them.
If our French organization commits itself to a policy such as the one we have just sketched, in some of its broad lines, there will follow, in due course, the genuine integration of dozens upon dozens of our militants into real mass work, within the very heart of the Stalinist movement. We shall thus follow it through the whole of its dynamic evolution, determined by the evolution of the international situation, and we shall be placed in the best conditions to profit from it. Such a policy will yield, in the immediate term: a field of work for several of our militants; it will gradually create, among the Stalinist militant milieux, an atmosphere of understanding of our fundamental political positions and of our critique of the fundamental contradictions and errors of Stalinist policy; it will even numerically strengthen our organization as a whole through the influx of Stalinist worker elements. For it to succeed, it will naturally require, as we have already noted, the understanding and loyal collaboration of the party leadership. Without this condition — which will in turn make it possible to have the whole party welded together, homogeneous, understanding, disciplined around its leadership — it is absolutely impossible to undertake any tactical manoeuvre of scale.
If the situation we currently have within our organization in France were to persist, not only would an experience of this kind be doomed from the outset, but no further progress at all would be possible. The party will stagnate and decline, powerless, confused, demoralized.
The question of the state of the leadership is the capital question for all our organizations. In a very large number of countries, we have fortunately resolved it in the direction of forming a homogeneous, disciplined team, deeply and unreservedly attached to the international. It is in France, comrades, that the most serious, the most dangerous, the most inadmissible backwardness still exists in this domain. It is time to put an end to it. We address the most pressing and urgent appeal to the central committee to understand this and to put an end to this situation. We are not asking the comrades to abandon the positions they believe to be correct, but to make a real effort truly to apply, with "understanding and discipline," the line of the international.
In the letter of 28 December 1951 which it addressed to us, the political bureau declares that it sees "no other solution than the opening of a thorough discussion, by means of international bulletins, on the problems of trade-union work and of the necessarily independent construction of parties under the conditions prevailing in the countries of Western Europe where Stalinism is the dominant form within the workers' movement."
Let us be quite clear. Under no circumstances is the SI prepared to put the line of the Third World Congress up for discussion within the party or the international. Any discussion, particularly within your party, must bear exclusively on the explanation, the meaning, and the best way of applying this line. It is the SI which, statutorily, and by the more precise mandate given to it on this subject by the world congress, is best qualified and most responsible for applying this line and ensuring that it is properly explained. The SI is answerable only before the CEI. The next CEI will examine the problems raised by the application of the line of the Third World Congress in countries such as France and Italy, where the Stalinists are the dominant force in the workers' movement. This indispensable discussion will take place on firm ground, that defined by the theses and resolutions of the world congress. It will allow us to advance our work and will stimulate our sections.
But what the PB majority is demanding is the continuation of the discussion that took place before the Seventh Congress of the party, ignoring the analysis and perspectives defined by the international, and — worse still — conducted at the lowest level, that of the distortion of the international's positions, of accusations and attacks. This kind of "discussion" we do not want, and it will not take place, for we have no wish to work toward the demoralization and decomposition of the party.
Perhaps the PB majority wishes to demonstrate to us that it has the majority of the party behind it? We have no need of discussion for that; we have never contested the votes of the Seventh Congress of the party — but neither has the PB majority contested the votes of the world congress, and, in our international party, the majority of the French section finds itself in a minority and must, out of discipline, apply the political and organizational decisions taken by the majority of the international. Any other attitude would have the effect of distorting the functioning of the international and of placing you outside it.
The mandate given to the SI by the world congress, the SI will fulfil without flinching and most energetically. For several months now we have shown the greatest flexibility in order to facilitate the PB majority's understanding of the tasks it should have been getting the party to carry out. Since the previous CC, the situation has only deteriorated. The documents which the PB majority is submitting to this CC constitute a challenge to the positions of the world congress, and carrying the discussion into the party would have no purpose other than to set the party against the leadership of the international.
We ask the CC to appoint a PB that will ensure the orientation of the international is applied firmly and in a manner that will allow no further time to be lost. We ask the CC to refuse any discussion within the party of documents opposed to the analysis, perspectives, and orientation of the Third World Congress. Our immediate attitude toward you will depend on the answers you give to these demands. The SI will assume, as it has the right to do, its responsibilities from this moment on, and will submit whatever measures may eventually be taken for the approval of the next CEI.
You therefore have to make one of the most important decisions for the future course of our French organization. We are in a world situation that opens up the greatest prospects for our movement, but which will subject us to the severest trials. Our essential strength in this situation — which has enabled us to survive for more than a quarter of a century despite every repression, and which will ensure our victory — is the international. Outside it there is no future at all.
We hope that the members of the CC, all of them, including those who have gone very far in recent weeks, will heed our warning, and that, together with the international, they will wish to overcome the present difficulties and set the course of the party right. As for us, we shall fulfil, from this moment on, the mandate the world congress entrusted to us. Communist internationalist greetings.
14 January 1952 The International Secretariat
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## Notes
1. Garaudy, an important member of the CC, proposed to the political bureau of the PCF that it win over the youth by abolishing the UJRF (Union de la Jeunesse Républicaine de France, created in 1945 after the dissolution of the Jeunesse Communiste) and recreating the Jeunesse Communiste.