Issuing body: Political Bureau of the PCI (as reconstituted by the 10th Plenum of the IEC)
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Resolution of the Political Bureau appointed by the IEC, on the framework of the discussion preparatory to the congress
The 10th Plenum of the IEC opened the discussion within the PCI in view of its congress of May 1952. This discussion must, in accordance with the statutes of the International and with the meaning of democratic centralism on an international scale that underlies the functioning of our world party, be based essentially on the application to France of the decisions of the world congress. The general sense of this application is set out by the political report adopted at the 10th Plenum of the IEC.
By the following resolution, the political bureau wishes in turn to make clear to all members of the party which problems must be regarded as having been settled by the Third World Congress and the 10th Plenum of the IEC, and which problems are today at the centre of the discussion.
The World Congress and the 10th Plenum of the IEC have settled the following questions, which are not to be the subject of discussion for the party congress:
1. Imperialism finds itself engaged "in the accelerated preparation, military and political, of a new world war," the only means of resolving in the short term the internal contradictions of the system, of preventing the outbreak of a large-scale economic crisis, and above all the only means of opposing the world-wide extension of the revolutionary upsurge and the uprising of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples against imperialism. Given the scale that the war economy has attained, this race towards war has become irreversible; only a social crisis within the United States itself could prevent Wall Street from settling its accounts with all the anti-imperialist forces of the world by way of the third world war.
2. Given the world social situation in which this war is being prepared and in which it will break out, given the relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie and the anti-imperialist forces both on a world scale and on the scale of the various sectors of world politics (Far East, Middle East, Western Europe, North Africa, and probably even Latin America), this war, which by its very nature is a class war (a counter-revolutionary war of imperialism against the USSR, the people's democracies, China, and the international workers' movement), will from the outset take the concrete form of an international civil war, and will lead, in the course of its unfolding, in most countries, to armed clashes between the imperialist forces and the anti-imperialist forces. It is this outcome of the international revolutionary upsurge that will give the third world war its character as the final settling of accounts between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
3. The Soviet bureaucracy continues to seek, "through a policy of harassment and pressure on the bourgeoisie," to force the latter into a compromise. But the objective basis for such an overall compromise has disappeared: the world-wide rupture of the relative balance between the classes has as its consequence that, on the one hand, imperialism is determined to engage in a fight to the death against the USSR and no longer wants compromise, while on the other hand the Soviet bureaucracy no longer has the possibility of imposing such a compromise on the world anti-imperialist forces, which are in turn determined to settle their accounts with imperialism. As a result, the Soviet bureaucracy finds itself placed in an entirely new situation. Its room for manoeuvre between the classes is reduced to the extreme and tends increasingly to disappear, all the more so as the mass Communist parties will increasingly feel the pressure of working-class radicalisation in their own countries. Faced with the direct threat to the material bases on which its privileges rest — nationalised property and the planned economy — the Soviet bureaucracy is obliged to defend the USSR in its own fashion. It will be obliged to do so politically under conditions entirely different from those of the Second World War: without the possibility of obtaining an alliance with any significant bourgeoisie, and under the growing pressure of an extraordinary revolutionary upsurge that is ceaselessly widening. Under these conditions, its policy will necessarily develop a leftward orientation already now taking shape, its only hope of maintaining control over important sectors of the world anti-imperialist forces. The revolutionary upsurge will necessarily result in the destruction of this control. The bureaucracy will indeed seek, as in the past, to repress by force the revolutionary centres that it can no longer control, but the generalisation of the upsurge will ultimately render its efforts to survive vain. The fate of the bureaucracy will be settled by the reckoning that is coming: it will succumb either under the blows of imperialism or under those of the Soviet masses, encouraged by the world victories of the revolution.
4. This perspective is situated within the framework of the programmatic analysis made by the Fourth International of the nature of the epoch in which we live and of the analysis of Stalinism contained in its programmatic documents (the Transitional Programme, the Second and Third World Congresses) and in the work of Leon Trotsky. The crisis of humanity remains the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The relatively rapid solution of this crisis through the fusion of the revolutionary vanguard with large sections of the mass movement is made possible for the first time by the scale of the present international revolutionary upsurge. The nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is that of a Bonapartist caste attached to the material base of the degenerated workers' state and striving to pursue a policy of balance between the classes both within Russia itself and on an international scale. That is why it is fundamentally opposed to the world-wide extension of the revolution, and why the survival of capitalism in part of the world is a condition of its existence in exactly the same way as the survival of the workers' state. The policy of the Soviet bureaucracy and of its international apparatus expresses this contradiction.
The imperialist race towards war and the amplification of the revolutionary upsurge will destroy every practical possibility of such a policy of balance and will drive the bureaucracy back onto the defence of the material base on which it lives. The Social Democratic and Stalinist parties remain degenerated parties whose leaderships no longer represent the historic interests of the proletariat of their respective countries. But the extreme sharpening of the class struggle compels these parties, wherever the majority of the working class follows them, to undergo the pressure of this situation and to express, in distorted form, the masses' will to revolutionary struggle. To this must be added, in the case of the Stalinist parties, the attachment of their leadership and their base to the USSR, and their determination, in the event of war, to throw their weight unconditionally into the balance in defence of the USSR, the people's democracies, China, and the colonial revolutions. Under these conditions, the strategy for building revolutionary parties must rely fully, in the various sectors of the world, on the revolutionary potential locked up within the organisations that represent the majority of the proletariat and of the oppressed masses in those sectors. It must enable our vanguard organisations to achieve, in the little time that separates us from the final reckoning, the maximum degree of integration into these mass organisations, so as to be able, in the course of the momentous struggles in which the fate of humanity will be decided, to win political leadership of these masses.
5. The French bourgeoisie, drawn into the arms race within the framework of the inter-imperialist united front, and bled white by the colonial war in Vietnam, is rapidly becoming the weakest link in the capitalist chain in Europe. "Under the combined effect of economic developments, the difficulties in the colonial sphere, and the strengthening of reaction in the new Parliament produced by the June elections, the class struggle in France is moving towards a climax." The bourgeoisie must strive to establish the strong state. Gaullism remains its essential instrument on this path; it is through the combination of parliamentary and dictatorial means of action that it will seek to attain its goal. This effort will run into growing resistance on the part of the masses and will place the broadest struggles on the order of the day.
6. The historic task of building the new leadership of the French working class thereby finds itself placed under new conditions. The little time separating us from the final struggles does not permit us, as an independent pole of attraction, to gather sufficient forces to be able to play a decisive role in the revolutionary explosion. On the other hand, the essential part of the forces of tomorrow's revolutionary party — the Communist worker-militants of the PCF, already more attached today to their party — will draw yet closer around it in the period ahead of us, in the face of the accelerated preparation for war, the great victories of the revolution in Asia, the threat weighing on the USSR, the people's democracies, China, and the colonial revolution, the threat of the strong state in France, and the fact that the PCF appears as the sole effective force capable of countering this threat. At the same time, however, that these workers draw ever closer around their traditional organisations, they will adopt an increasingly critical attitude within those organisations towards Stalinist policy, and above all towards its themes inspired by the Kremlin (peaceful coexistence, a peace pact between the "Big Five," the collection of signatures as the principal activity, the absence of a clearly revolutionary perspective on an international scale and especially on a French scale, the absence of a clear governmental perspective, etc.). The Stalinist leadership, and even the Kremlin itself, will be obliged to take account of this development. This will accentuate the leftward course of the PCF (determined today above all by the needs of the general policy of harassment of the bourgeoisie decided upon by the Kremlin). This accentuation of the leftward course of the Communist parties will in turn react upon the revolutionary orientation of the Communist militants, reinforcing it and reinforcing the general radicalisation of the working-class vanguard.
7. The orientation of the PCI must be wholly determined by the will to fuse, whatever the cost, with the explosive revolutionary forces accumulating within the Stalinist organisations, with the aim of participating, in a way organically bound up with these forces, in tomorrow's revolutionary uprisings, which will make it possible to break the Kremlin's grip on the workers' movement. That is the deep meaning of the formula: orient towards the Communist workers. The concrete form of this orientation can only be a combination of independent work and entrist work within the whole range of Stalinist organisations or organisations under Stalinist control (CGT, UJRF, UFF, Henri Martin committees, Peace Defence committees, single trade unions, single union branches, PCF, etc.). This is in no way a matter of liquidating Trotskyism as an independent current within the political workers' movement; on the contrary, a correct understanding of the situation can enable it to play an important role in the months ahead. But it is a matter of understanding that the independent organisation must above all assist entrist work by speaking a language addressed essentially to the Communist workers, and that entrist work will grow in scale as we draw closer to war.
This general framework of the discussion having been established, the discussion will apply more particularly to the following problems:
1. The concrete stages that the decomposition of the French colonial empire, the economic crisis of French capitalism, and the crisis of its political regime will pass through in the months ahead; the working-class reactions to be expected in response to these events; and the direction that social conflicts will take under these conditions.
2. The situation within the PC, the whole of its policy, and the concrete forms taken by the leftward evolution of this Stalinist policy, which is necessarily contradictory, disparate, and tortuous. The concrete state of relations between the PCF and the masses within the framework of the perspectives defined above. The reactions to this evolution on the part of the working class and of the Communist workers within the Stalinist organisations. The concrete possibilities that will open up for the party to integrate its militants, according to this or that particular situation, into the various Stalinist organisations, and thereby to prepare the realisation of its long-term policy.
3. The forms that this entrist work will take, necessarily prepared by a period of individual integration without open demarcation, a period during which our comrades will show themselves to be the best militants in the organisation they are entering. These forms will be specific to each sector of work (trade unions, youth, women, PCF).
4. The policy and mode of activity of the independent organisation, defending the Trotskyist programme and thereby openly demarcating itself from the Stalinist line, but in such a way as to favour differentiation within the Stalinist organisations, so as thereby to assist entrist work.
31 March 1952 Adopted unanimously.