Author: Daniel Renard, leader of the PCI majority
Letter from Daniel Renard to James P. Cannon
Dear comrade Cannon,
I am taking the liberty of writing to you today because I think you are one of the comrades of the Trotskyist movement best qualified to assess the situation in our section, as well as the conflict currently under way between the French party and the International Secretariat.
I have read In Defense of Marxism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party: the efforts, the battles, the experiences through which the American Trotskyists, and you in particular, have gone give you all the necessary background to tell me what you think of what we are doing here.
All the leaderships of the Trotskyist sections now have in their possession a document from the International Secretariat dated 21 January 1952 concerning the French section.
However, with its five pages of text, this document does not give an accurate account of what is happening. It offers no political view of the situation but a purely administrative version of the conflict. Reading this document, one could conclude that the leaders of the French section, out of caprice, are led to react to the IS's decisions with ill humour and stubbornness.
In reality, the facts are entirely different. No one in the international is unaware of the differences that set the majority of the French section against the IS up until the world congress. These differences were expressed through votes and documents. The French majority tried to clarify the nature of these differences, particularly during the period of preparation for the 7th Congress of the French party.
But the differences that put the French party in opposition to the IS were eased, if not resolved, by the 3rd World Congress. This was expressed in a resolution of the world congress's French commission, a resolution unanimously approved by the central committee of our section, insofar as it concerns the line for applying the policy adopted by the 3rd World Congress. To say, as the IS does, that the French majority "continued" in practice to want to apply the line of the 7th Congress of the PCI is inaccurate, and is refuted by the whole attitude and policy applied by the French leadership since the world congress.
Allow me to insist on the fact that Pablo, by opposing any vote at the world congress on the documents that the delegates presented there (in particular the ten theses drafted by comrade Germain and adopted by our 7th Congress), on the pretext that the international had not discussed them, was thereby unable to have our positions condemned by the congress.
The truth is that, whatever the field of activity of our party, nothing has given rise to the slightest criticism from any leading body of the international regarding any unwillingness to apply the line laid down by the last world congress.
Regarding "youth" work, a draft resolution was presented by the political bureau. It gave rise to a certain number of criticisms, particularly from comrades of the minority. A joint commission of PB members was elected. This commission submitted a new, revised youth document which was finally adopted. In the four months during which this resolution has been in force, it has given rise to no significant criticism, either from the ranks of the minority or from the IS.
If we take trade-union work, right up to and including the last meeting of the national contact commission of Unité, it has proceeded on the basis of complete agreement between the French party majority and the IS. Written directives were submitted and unanimously adopted by a commission of which comrade Frank was a member. They were subsequently called into question again by a completely different document, which I will discuss further below.
Finally, a last field, but not the least: our central organ, la Vérité, has never been challenged on substance, by anyone, at any time, for failing to apply the line of the 3rd World Congress. What is more, comrade Pablo declared at the Paris regional assembly that la Vérité showed "the obvious progress made by the French leadership in applying the political line laid down by the 3rd World Congress." But if, as the IS letter claims, the French leadership "continues to want to apply the line of the 7th Congress of the PCI," where should this be more evident than in la Vérité? Our newspaper, the principal public expression of our party, is best placed to reflect, in the light of events, the political positions of the leadership that publishes it.
Thus, since the 3rd World Congress, the French leadership has indeed made every effort to apply the policy of our international "with understanding and discipline." Furthermore, it has maintained complete silence within the party regarding the IS's ceaselessly renewed demands upon us. Shortcomings may have appeared here and there. They were inevitable. But in no way deliberate. Had this been the case, had the leadership actually wanted to follow a different line, this would have appeared not accidentally, episodically and fragmentarily, but throughout the party's activity, in every field and at every stage. Examples of such an attitude of indiscipline would be so numerous that it would not be difficult to present a great many.
But the IS letter nowhere formulates a clear or precise accusation. In fact, there are two quite distinct phases in the struggle between the IS and the French leadership. The first phase unfolds after the 3rd World Congress, a period during which the party oriented its work on the basis of the French resolution. This application, in its course, required certain adjustments. Then there was a second phase whose starting date can be established very precisely: it is 6 December 1951, when the IS produced a document entitled "For the Reorientation of Our Trade-Union Work in France."
This document, of which it was not known whether it was a binding resolution to be applied as soon as it appeared or a contribution to the discussion of the trade-union question in France, called into question in a new way the decisions and documents of the world congress. The astonishment and indignation that such a document aroused in the leadership of the French party were entirely well founded. It was no longer a matter of interpretation, of splitting hairs over this or that phrase: this text was in fundamental and formal opposition to the text of the world congress's French commission.
For example, the French resolution states the following: "The necessary turn in the activity of the French party which results from the turn in the world situation in no way means the abandonment of the activities undertaken and the results obtained by these activities. On the contrary (...)."
The IS text explains: "In order to achieve these objectives, which are possible from now on, it is necessary not to attempt to constitute ourselves as a distinct tendency [within the CGT], which is not objectively justified at this stage, but to integrate ourselves by rapidly becoming the best artisans of the unification of the trade-union movement, taking a clear and unambiguous position everywhere in favour of the CGT's unity proposals, and manoeuvring skilfully with regard to the Stalinist leaders so as to calm their suspicion of us and allow them to consider us useful instruments for their unity policy."
Of all this, the IS letter dated 21 January says not a word: in this way, the conflict between the French party and the IS is made incomprehensible. The opposition that manifests itself on administrative and organizational questions can only be explained in the light of the political positions of each of the opponents. Any other way of trying to clarify the discussion can in fact only obscure it. This is all the clearer if one considers the IS letter of 14 January to the members of the central committee. There too, once again, the CC found itself confronted with new positions totally contrary to the letter and spirit of the 3rd World Congress. The question was that of entrism in the CP, but a very special, sui generis kind of entrism, as the IS itself described it. Independent work was subordinated to this entrism ("Independent work must be understood as having as its essential purpose to assist 'entrist' work and must itself be directed above all towards Stalinist workers." "Entrist work will take on ever greater scope the closer we approach war." Letter from the IS to CC members).
But the world congress declared precisely: "In countries where the majority of the working class continues to follow the CPs, our organizations, which must remain independent, should turn towards more systematic work directed at the militants of these parties and the masses they influence." ("Theses on the Perspectives and Orientation of the Fourth International.")
This is so true that the Italian comrades, whose political situation is analogous to ours in many respects, drafted a resolution on work directed towards CP workers. The question of entrism is considered and resolved as follows: "This 'entrist' tactic does not exclude but presupposes independent work..."; "Taking these needs into account, we conclude that independent work must not be liquidated, but that, on the contrary, it will be necessary to provide it with additional resources." The Italian comrades, in writing this, believe they are applying the line of the 3rd World Congress. But to say, as the IS does, that this Italian resolution "supports a tactic identical to that proposed by the IS letter of 14 January to the CC of the French party" is to refuse to admit the obvious. The IS's position makes independent work a supplement to entrism; the Italian comrades do exactly the opposite. It takes a considerable degree of political short-sightedness to equate the two positions.
In my opinion, the IS is seeking to conceal the true motives for the dispute by accusing the French majority of not wanting to apply the line of the 3rd World Congress and of wanting to substitute for it the line of the 7th Congress of our party. In truth, the French leadership is not in opposition to the IS, but to what we, in France, have called "Pabloism." That is what is at issue. And today, under cover of our international leadership, Pablo is trying to pass off his own positions. When the French majority says that the trade-union resolution, like the IS letter to members of the central committee of 19 and 20 January, is not an honest expression of the world congress, it is saying, in another form, that Pabloism did not carry the day at the 3rd World Congress. To be convinced of this, one need only turn to "Where Are We Going?" and to the theses of the 3rd World Congress.
The struggle in which the French party has found itself engaged, and in which I take part, has had as its framework the punitive action of the IS suspending the majority of the central committee, a measure directed against all the live forces of the party, against everything that, directly or indirectly, touches upon working-class and trade-union work. This punitive measure is unjust and unjustifiable. It amounts to the suppression of all genuine leadership in every field of activity. And how does the IS explain the measure? By the accusation of "organizational and political decomposition." And on what does it base this accusation? On hearsay and gossip. But if the party leadership is decomposing politically and organizationally, this ought to be confirmed by means other than the accusations of the minority comrades. Decomposition, if it is political, must appear in documents, and in particular in the documents submitted precisely to the CC plenum at which the majority was suspended. Political decomposition ought also to appear in our central organ la Vérité, ten issues of which have come out since the world congress. This aspect of the political decomposition of our leadership is all the more important given that this letter alludes to Shachtman, the POUM, and the Yugoslavs. Those of our comrades who took part in the First World Congress took a position against the proposal to consider the WP a "sympathizing section." Since that date, we have not written or spoken a single word that could justify an amalgamation with Shachtman. There is no basis for comparison between our position and that of the POUM, to whom la Vérité replied when it attacked our 3rd World Congress. None of our positions is identical to that of the Yugoslavs, against whom we have waged an offensive for eighteen months on every ground on which they have appeared (brigades, trade unions, youth). In what way, directly or indirectly, does the argumentation used by the French leadership resemble the positions taken by Shachtman, the POUM, or the Yugoslavs? In no way. And this is an unprincipled amalgamation that condemns only those who make use of it.
As for the decomposition of the leadership of our party from an organizational point of view, what are the symptoms that reveal it? Have members resigned? Has the newspaper failed to appear? Have directives not been issued to launch this or that action, at this or that moment? If the leadership, as the party's driving force, is decomposing, what better test than the last strike movement of 12 February to verify it? But here too, as in the past, our leadership, taught by experience and conscious of the situation created in the party by the IS's coup de force, proved equal to its task.
All this tends to demonstrate that a bad cause requires, in order to be defended, the use of bad methods. And this, likewise, explains why, for us, the struggle against Pabloism is not a matter of secondary importance. The French majority has become convinced, over the course of the many months during which it has opposed Pabloism, that the latter means the destruction of Trotskyism, at least in Western Europe. The intensity of the struggle, on either side, can only be explained or justified from this perspective.
If we return to trade-union work, we find in the French resolution of the world congress, a resolution our CC adopted, the following perspective set out in these terms: "The agreements that served as the basis for Unité (an essential element of the French section's trade-union work) are entered into under the guarantee of free expression for the different currents gathered around the newspaper. The party's overall activity within Unité continues unchanged." This is clear and utterly unambiguous. Four months after these lines were written, one can read the following sentence from the pen of the IS: "It is necessary not to attempt to constitute ourselves as a distinct tendency," opposed to the Stalinists. What does this sentence mean, if not to hand us over bound hand and foot to the Stalinist bureaucrats? For us, however, the perspective is clear: the situation of the French trade-union movement is such that it requires us in no way to abandon the orientation defined by the French resolution of the world congress. That variations in Stalinist policy may require us to use one tactic or another is obvious. But this is an altogether different matter from the IS's text of renunciation.
If we take up again the question of entry into the CP, our perspective is clear. We are not opposed to examining the possibility, something we had already stated well before the IS letter of 14 January to CC members. But for us, this is above all a matter of fraction work, which cannot alter the work of the independent party and, above all, cannot in any way alter the independent character of the Trotskyist programme in relation to Stalinism. Not only do we think that fraction work within the CP is necessary and indispensable, but we say that this idea of entering the CP must be considered by the whole party as an eventuality for which we must prepare ourselves in view of the great social upheavals and the permanent upheavals within the Stalinist apparatus to come. For Pablo, it is a matter of something quite different. It is a matter of pure and simple integration into Stalinism, relying on it to accomplish a number of historic tasks that Trotskyism is incapable of fulfilling.
Politics has its own logic, and Pablo's politics especially so. Did he not declare to the CC of 19 and 20 January that the Transitional Programme was an inadequate instrument for truly judging what Stalinism is today? This might have passed as a momentary error on Pablo's part, but since that declaration the idea has made headway, and at the last Paris regional meeting, comrade Frank, a member of the IS, declared that the Transitional Programme's idea that "the Third International had definitively gone over to the side of bourgeois order" was an incorrect idea. And comrade Corvin, a member of the central committee, also declared that to speak of oscillations of the Stalinist bureaucracy amounted to calling into question the working-class character of the USSR, adding that we would soon see no more oscillations, but rather hesitations of Stalinism in accomplishing the tasks of the revolution. Did not comrade Mestre, a member of the political bureau, declare that sui generis entrism has become necessary because "Stalinism has changed"? All this is evidently not the fruit of chance. All this expresses, within our own ranks, nothing but the pressure of Stalinism on the petty bourgeoisie of Western Europe, which finds its echo in our organization.
This explains why I have personally declared that, confronted with such positions, the party must rise up unanimously and condemn such crimes. What concerns me is not to create an atmosphere of hostility within the French section "towards the international," as the IS letter implies. What concerns me is to defend the essential programmatic foundations of our movement, which constitute its wealth and the surest guarantee of victory.
The position I have taken in this battle is the product of experience accumulated over years of belonging to the workers' movement, and in particular of my struggle for Trotskyism at the Renault factory. To invent the notion that our opposition to the Pabloite line stems from an infantile anti-Stalinism is to conceal the real character of Pabloism, as it reveals itself more and more clearly with each passing day. Today Pablo is compelled to call into question the fundamental ideas of the Transitional Programme in order to sustain his line. What will happen tomorrow?
The method used by Pablo has led me to reflect a great deal, and in particular I have relived the struggle waged by Trotsky against Shachtman, Burnham, and Abern in 1939-1940 in the American section. The method used by the IS is the absolute opposite. Trotsky and all the American comrades at his side fought politically and tried to convince the comrades of the SWP through the widest and most fundamental discussion possible. In particular, Trotsky constantly turned to the party's working-class base, addressed himself to it, using the best pedagogical methods for this purpose, so that the discussion would at least serve to educate the party. Here, there is contempt for the working-class base of the party because it is the majority. We see fundamental questions evaded on false pretexts. To an entire leadership opposed to its line, the IS responds with "suspension" and justifies itself with insults.
From all this, the party (and by party I mean the whole international) can only lose. It is not possible to destroy a Trotskyist section on the pretext that it does not share Pablo's ideas about the role of the Soviet bureaucracy and about "centuries of transition." To destroy is not the role of a leader of the international: his role is not to destroy the human foundations of any policy, entrist or otherwise.
My letter has no other purpose than to warn you of this danger, to explain the situation, and to ask your opinion. I hope I have accomplished my task. Please accept, dear comrade, fraternally, my best Bolshevik-Leninist wishes.
Daniel Renard Paris, 16 February 1952