Issuing body: Central Committee of the PCI (Parti Communiste Internationaliste, majority tendency)
Declaration of the Central Committee of the PCI (majority tendency) to all militants and leaders of the Fourth International
Comrades,
On 27 June, the party premises were plundered. All the typewriters and all the duplicating machines disappeared. The team that carried out this military operation had made sure in the preceding days that no special security measures had been taken that might have complicated its task. It entered at closing time for the party premises, by means of false keys that had been made a month earlier, at the latest in the last week of May.
Those who took part, directly or indirectly, in the operation were: Frank, M. Mestre, Privas, Ernesto; overall direction was assured by Pablo.
The minority fraction of the PB and the IS were unable to hide their responsibility in this affair, but attempted, in a provocative communiqué, to justify it by the "securing" of the party's material. Thus a minority fraction, backed by the IS but convinced that it could not win over the Trotskyist worker-militants of the PCI to its erroneous policy, took the criminal initiative of splitting the party a fortnight before its national congress.
In its split communiqué, it announced that the congress would be reserved for party members who accepted its leadership individually and in advance. In plain terms, this means that the minority was deserting the discussion, deserting the party's congress, deserting the party.
The act committed, and the declarations, at once hypocritical and provocative, which accompany it, the cynical initiative of a split on the eve of the congress, testify to the petty-bourgeois social character of the Pabloite fraction and its degree of degeneration.
The Pabloite fraction had the 11th International Executive Committee vote that the congress would be prepared democratically and without organizational changes: at that very moment it had already worked out, materially, the coup that was to deprive the party of every means of expression, both among the masses and in the internal preparation of the congress, and had already decided on the split of the party before the congress. Its orientation was the split of the French section, the expulsion from the International of the proletarian majority of the PCI — in practice of the whole of its living forces linked to sectors of the working class.
This orientation does not date from yesterday: it took Pabloism a year and a half to carry it out without provoking a reaction from the sections of the International. In December 1950, shortly after the 9th Plenum, Germain — who was still then defending the programmatic foundations of the Fourth International and drafting for that purpose the "Ten Theses" which he has since disowned — advised the French section not to take part in the international discussion preparatory to the 3rd World Congress, declaring: "Pablo is looking for the first opportunity to destroy the French section." At the CC of 30 June 1952, a few days after the split perpetrated by the minority, he confirmed his words of December 1950, adding... that his predictions had come true.
In the course of the World Congress, Pablo had a series of discriminatory measures applied against the French section: factional preparation of the congress, non-distribution and non-translation of the documents adopted by the PCI's congress with a view to the World Congress, refusal to put to the vote the resolutions presented by the French majority delegation and, in particular, the "Ten Theses," refusal to allow French majority delegates to take part in the congress's working commissions, the setting up of a "French commission" designed to take organizational measures against a section which had committed the fault of exposing the confused and contradictory character of the documents presented to the World Congress and the revisionist nature of Pablo's personal positions.
On 16 January 1952, Pablo and his "IS Bureau" called back into question the political decisions of the French commission of the World Congress, discovered the new line of entrism sui generis, and instructed the central committee, which was to meet four days later, to proceed, without a congress and hence without discussion, to apply the turn set out in a letter from the IS Bureau. The CC cancelled its previous agenda, agreed to examine only the letter from the IS Bureau, agreed to apply the recommended turn immediately, but maintained its determination that a congress, prepared and held democratically, should come and clarify the whole set of problems thus raised: the nature and perspective of entrism, the nature and perspective of the Stalinist organization. Pablo's response to this elementary demand was the dissolution of the party's central committee on the charge of "intent to indiscipline."
At the 10th Plenum, the offensive against the PCI was intensified in the form of insults and slanders. But the 10th Plenum was not yet ready to follow Pablo in his views on the French section. A pause had to be marked, after the failure of the abortive coup of 20 January. This produced the agreements of the 10th Plenum, whereby the PCI obtained that a democratic and sovereign congress would be held, with complete freedom of expression and discussion.
Three months after this congress, the IEC was to be called upon to rule on the report of its designated official for that period. In return, the majority handed the leadership of the party to the Pabloite fraction by granting it the majority on the political bureau.
The history of this Pabloite leadership is that of the sabotage of the party and the cynical preparation of the party's split. The Pabloite "majority" imposed on the political bureau attempted to forbid the proletarian majority of the party from expressing its own political positions in the discussion for the congress. Failing to approve Frank's texts was branded as indiscipline. Thus the Pabloites' pledge to hold a democratic congress took on its full meaning.
On the sole pretext that the proletarian majority was expressing its political positions in the discussions for the congress, the Pabloites, contrary to the time limit set at the 10th Plenum, raised again at the 11th Plenum, three months later, the question of the sovereignty of the congress. After a year and a half of manoeuvres, the Pabloite fraction wanted to have done with the French section. It had the IEC adopt:
The rejection of a statute of the type existing in Austria, which would have made it possible to save the whole gains of Trotskyism in France by realizing the conditions for the experiment and for the resorption of disagreements.
The rejection of the sovereignty of the congress, the minority being automatically to take the leadership through a preponderance in the CC and the PB.
In reality, Pabloism could not stop there; its political bankruptcy, its gross errors, its pro-Stalinist lies could not withstand the light of a congress, even a non-sovereign one. It was necessary to split beforehand. And that was the coup of 27 June.
The split perpetrated by the minority is in the logic of Pabloism. To cast out of the ranks of the International the near-totality of the worker-militants who make Trotskyism a living reality within the French working class is one of the imperatives of pro-Stalinist liquidationism. But the provocative form adopted by the split shows that Pabloism could not confine itself to driving out the defenders of the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism. It was necessary to give the rupture a scandalous and public character, to strike a serious material blow at the Trotskyist party, to attempt to paralyse it in its action among the masses. Such is the meaning of the coup of 27 June.
It gives its full significance to the publication, in the review Quatrième Internationale, of the resolution on entrism sui generis. This publication, contrary to the special security measures decided by the 10th Plenum concerning the internal circulation of this text, was intended to strike a blow at the PCI's external activity and also to give public guarantees to the Stalinist bureaucrats. What further guarantee could the Pabloites give to the bureaucrats, if not the scandalous expulsion of the majority loyal to Trotskyism? The coup of 27 June is a fresh manifestation of Pabloism's servility toward the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Comrades,
Since the 9th Plenum, we have fought against the revisionism that was establishing itself in the leadership of the International. This pro-Stalinist revisionism began with the degeneration of the Yugoslav revolution, which unseated and pushed a few leaders toward Stalinism. The clear expression of this revisionism was given by Pablo in "Where Are We Going?," which substituted the idea of blocs for the Marxist conception of society, which substituted centuries of transition for the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist perspective of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the march to socialism, which identified the Chinese revolution with Stalin, and which revised, in a Stalinist sense, the Trotskyist conception of the defence of the USSR.
Camouflaged at the World Congress in confused and contradictory documents, Pabloism would express itself in practice in an increasingly aggressive manner against the French section. For the needs of its struggle in France, Pabloism disowns its representatives in England, in America, in Ceylon. That is why confusion continues to reign in the International as to the nature of Pabloism: how could revisionism have installed itself in the leadership of the International without everyone detecting it through its practical consequences? Such is the answer that comrades of the International regularly put to us, to urge us to patience and submission.
To these comrades we say: after the blow struck against the French section of the Fourth International, other blows will follow. We fervently hope that, unlike the Horatii and Curiatii of history, the sections will not allow themselves to be struck down one after another, each time accusing the victim of the moment of impatience and impulsiveness, waiting for each of them in turn to feel the direct proof of the revisionism installed in the leadership of the International. We say to them: to wait to be destroyed before recognizing and combating revisionism is a bad policy. Ruins convince nobody. They do not strengthen the revolutionary line; they strengthen revisionism, and revisionism alone.
Comrades,
Faced with the pro-Stalinist splitters, the Central Committee has decided to maintain the PCI. The congress, which will be held on 13 and 14 July, will confirm this decision.
To maintain the PCI means to maintain Trotskyism in France, not as "Trotskyism in a single country" but as a weapon of international Trotskyism, of the world party of the revolution. The struggle of the PCI on the basis of the Trotskyist programme is a not inconsiderable asset in the rejection by the International of Pabloite revisionism. To accept the destruction of the PCI would, on the contrary, strengthen the revisionism that is gangrening the International from its summit. The PCI, amputated by the criminal split of the Pabloite fraction, will firmly maintain the programme of Trotskyism and will fight relentlessly to be recognized as the French section of the Fourth International. This struggle will be long, for we are not unaware that our situation as a party excluded by the international leadership will momentarily alienate from us the wish for understanding of our sister sections.
But we have unshakeable confidence in the outcome of this struggle. Our confidence is founded on indestructible foundations; it is based on our certainty that the programme of Trotskyism will resist revision victoriously, for Trotskyism represents and condenses the highest experience of the whole revolutionary movement and finds fresh confirmation of its correctness every day. It is based on the existence of Trotskyist sections throughout the world, which are firmly attached to the programme and which will inevitably react against revision.
It is based on our conviction that there exist no objective grounds, within our International, on which revision can long prosper and introduce degeneration.
Having split our party, Pabloism, achieving the ends it had long premeditated, will exclude us from the International. But Pabloism's success will be short-lived; the International will inevitably rectify its leadership, will break pro-Stalinist revisionism. At this stage, the life and struggle of the PCI will act positively in the direction of this rectification, whereas its ruin, were we to accept it, would act negatively. Pabloism will exclude us, but we shall not cease to fight to be recognized as an integral part, as the French section, of the Fourth International. Pabloism triumphs momentarily; it strikes us for our fidelity to the founding programme of our International. This fidelity guarantees the future of the PCI and its inevitable return to our International once it is rid of revisionism.
The Central Committee of the PCI, 30 June 1952.